User Testing for Ubuntu Development

[Daniel Holbach]

Hello everybody,

for the remainder of the cycle I would like to run "User Testing for
Ubuntu Development". We all know how multiple improvements went into our
documentation and infrastructure, but apart from occasional bug reports
we don't really know how well it works for new contributors. There might
even be a number of people who gave up after getting stuck without them
letting us know.

This would be the first run of User Testing and I'd like it to be a
timed experiment for the remainder of the release. It would be fairly
general and at UDS we could discuss results and a plan forward. Future
testing could be much more focused on specific things.

The way this would work is: we announce the initiative and ask new
contributors to introduce themselves by mailing an email address which
is maintained by a small team. We'd ask them to read the Development
Guide and try to get involved in Ubuntu development. Whatever they are
interested in doing is of interest to us. We'd ask them to let us know
about their experience. In return we are going to file bugs on docs,
tools or infrastructure and tag them with 'devtesting', so we can track
progress. Also we would help them to some degree (not necessarily do all
their homework for them) if they should get stuck.

This initiative would serve two purposes. Firstly, we'd get good
feedback from new contributors, so we can improve our story and make
plans at UDS. Secondly this is a great opportunity for new contributors
who might be a bit hesitant still to show up on mailing lists, IRC or in
merge proposals.

I don't think this will be huge amounts of work, but very valuable instead.

If you think this is a great idea and could imagine helping out a bit,
please let me know privately. If you have additional thoughts or
questions before we announce this, please comment. :-)

Have a great day,
 Daniel

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