Reflections on the BuddyUp team week
Several weeks ago, we embarked on a unique experiment in the QA realm – a Pilot project where community will actually own the testing of a Mozilla product. I came up with this idea back in the latter part of 2014 when I found out about an app called BuddyUp which is designed to be a support app on FX OS devices. It seemed to really lend itself well to community involvement, and I thought it would be interesting to try something new to get community involved in our QA functional area. It also is a great example of a project that aligns very well with the Mozilla mission - human collaboration across an open platform.
We started out the process by creating a wiki page and asking community to apply for an upcoming event that the team was having in the Paris space. I felt it was important to have the community meet and interact with the entire team working on the app: Development, UX, Project Management, Content, etc. We selected 4 individuals for the project: Christos Bacharakis, Alfredos (fredy) Damkalis and Karthikeyan Palaniswamy. We also selected another individual from the community who unfortunately was not able to make it to the event. I also asked Ioana Chiorean to join us at the event as a QA mentor, knowing that she would be an incredibly valuable asset when it came to being able to work with these 3 individuals and share her QA experience.
Prior to the beginning of the event, Ioana and I created a homework assignment for the participants to complete. The idea was to get the app installed and get them thinking about the workflows in the various parts of the app. It turned out this worked out really well, and I think it really got the week off to a good start. Karthikeyan created a really interesting mindmap to document the flow of his area – you can see it below:
As the week progressed, Ioana documented both the bugs we filed each day as well as some of the QA topics we covered. Part of the week was about working with the devs and filing bugs, and part of it was about having a few sessions that focused on the things such as:
QA Methodology and thinking like a tester
Exploratory Testing
Writing good Bugzilla bugs
How to Write a Good Testcase in Moztrap
Introduction to Automation – Johan Lorenzo
The feedback I got from many individuals at the event was that they thought it was very successful – some really good bugs got filed during the course of the week, and because there had really not been QA “eyes” on the app yet, we were able to work through all the user flows and verify the implementation of the defined user stories. There were some challenges for sure, but I think everyone left the event energized and ready for the next step. I think the big wins during the week were:
Participants filing lots of good bugs
Participants entering a set of test cases into Moztrap
Creating a BuddyUp smoketest that will be run once a week by someone in the team
Sharing our QA knowledge with the participants
The second phase of this project will be working to onboard additional community members and have them work with Fredy, Christos and Karthikeyan. We hope to have a follow up event with the QA team at the end of May to see how everyone is progressing and to follow up with some additional training.
Thanks to all that participated – Fredy, Christos, and Karthikeyan were all very enthusiastic participants and all three of them put a lot of effort and energy into the daily activities. Thanks also to Ioana for her wonderful mentorship and adding so much enthusiasm to the project. Finally, thanks to the entire BuddyUp team for their patience working with the team during the course of the week.
You can find pictures of the event here.
