An idea on the structure of QA

[Nicholas Skaggs]

Hi Jiří!

Thank you for your feedback. Let me try and respond to some of your
questions.

The document has been thru a few iterations, so likely the goals
aligning with the solution so tightly is an aspect of that. Those goals
were the goals I had in mind when I started down this road. The goals
are probably the most important piece of the document -- it's important
everyone in the community is unified around them. If not, it's hard to
discuss how to implement them; and harder still to achieve them if the
community is divided.

The use cases is something I added to the document as a means of
thinking about the problem. Use cases are part of the template for
specifications -- and I believe they are included to remind you to think
about the problem from different perspectives :-) I want to keep all
these types of contributors in mind -- I outlined some current potential
scenarios as well as users in those scenarios. The proposal doesn't
directly address all of those use cases, but I wanted our plans going
forward to keep them in mind.

On the team participation front, it's certainly possible to participate
in multiple teams under the proposal. This is the same as the current
structure; it is possible now to participate in multiple teams. How
effective someone can be at it is up to them and the requirements they
take on for both teams. I certainly don't see it as a harmful thing, but
I wouldn't expect it to be commonplace.

The question on membership renewal is a great one. Generally the
approach taken by ubuntu is that you are a member until you feel you no
longer can or wish to meet the requirements of being a member (afiak!).
Additionally, being a member or not, if your dodging your
responsibilities on the team for whatever reason, the team is likely to
re-assign them so as to not be hampered. I am intrigued by your new
testers comment -- do you feel you have done things to allow new folks
to be so productive in comparison to seasoned testers? Why do you think
they excel?

Great questions/comments-- I appreciate the dialog! Keep'em coming ;-)

Nicholas

On 03/19/2012 10:09 AM, Jiří Kovalský wrote:
> Hello Nicholas,
>
>    I am quite new to this mailing list so I apologize if my post will
> sound ignorant. :) Actually, I admit that my intention was to learn
> how community QA is organized at Ubuntu to get some inspiration and
> improve our own processes [1] at NetBeans.
>
> [1] http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetCAT
>
>    The new structure proposal is well written and clear to me. The
> Goals section though seems like you created it after the solution was
> found and not vice-versa as it should normally be in my opinion. Also
> I didn't understand the purpose of Use Cases section. Did you want to
> assign Mark, Jim, Kathy and Michelle to some team later in the
> document or these were only mentioned to keep the four basic types of
> contributors in mind?
>
>    Finally, I might have overlooked it in the text, but would it be
> possible to participate in some Infrastructure team and in another
> Testing team at the same time? If so, is this what you really want?
> And out of curiosity, would there be a membership renewal process? Our
> 8-years experience from cooperation with the NetBeans community is
> that although well known and seasoned testers are very useful, its
> typically brand new participants who excel.
>
> I hope this feedback is at least somehow helpful.
>
> Best regards,
> -- 
> Jiří Kovalský
> NetBeans Community Manager
> http://www.netbeans.org
>
> On 14.3.2012 21:03, Nicholas Skaggs wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone,
>> Today during the weekly QA community meeting, I shared my idea for
>> organizing the QA community to be more effective at communication and
>> working efficiently with each other, in addition to helping recruit and
>> retain new members and grow. I'd like to also share this idea with the
>> mailing list and the community at large. I'll just repeat a little bit
>> of what was spoken about on IRC for reference. The full log is available
>> here:
>>
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Meetings/QA/20120314
>>
>> The background on this proposal stems from my own attempts at learning
>> about QA in ubuntu. I went on a misson to list and catalog everyone
>> doing QA work in ubuntu (although I'm sure I missed some people, and if
>> so, I apologize!). I posted the results of this on my blog the other
>> day.
>>
>> http://www.theorangenotebook.com/2012/03/whos-who-on-quality-in-ubuntu.html
>>
>>
>> Once I had the list of teams, it became apparent that communicating and
>> understanding everything that was going on was going to be hard. In the
>> weeks following me creating my list, I learned about more teams, more
>> interesting work being done, etc. It seemed like when I would hear about
>> a new tool I would find out someone else in ubuntu had used/was using
>> that tool and here was there work, etc. Given these experiences, I
>> started writing some thoughts about a proposal to organize the QA
>> community to meet 3 specific goals that I thought would be hard to meet
>> under the current structure:
>>
>> Ease of Communication
>> Ability to recruit and retain community members
>> Ability to scale with growth potential
>>
>> These are also in the proposal, which you can read here:
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/ProposedTeamStructure
>>
>> I'd like everyone to remember that of course this is just an idea. I am
>> hoping to spark some discussion about solving the problems that I have
>> brought up. Namely, how can we better communicate as a diverse group of
>> teams?; how can we work more effectively?; how can we grow our
>> community? Ideas and input on the proposal, as well as the
>> problems/solutions are very welcome. I want us to rally around solving
>> these issues, and come to the best solution as a community for us to
>> pursue.
>>
>> Lastly I wanted to bring up an important piece about the proposal. It is
>> purposefully sparse on implementation details. I gave a proposed
>> structure, but I did not directly assign teams into that structure. This
>> was intentional. I want us as a community to talk about specific teams
>> and the changes would happen to them as part of drafting a blueprint to
>> implement this plan. To this end, the plan is focused more upon the work
>> items we value and hold as part of the QA community and the people and
>> roles they can fill to accomplish that work. The specifics on the teams
>> those people belong to, I see as a part of the next steps in writing and
>> executing an implementation plan.
>>
>> The timeline of next steps is to gather feedback and discussion on this
>> proposal, decide to move forward with a proposal (this proposal, a
>> modified version of it, or perhaps a different proposal entirely),
>> create a workplan and finally execute the plan.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Nicholas