Reflections on Drupal Quality Assurance
We recently launched ReviewDriven, a distributed quality assurance platform, which is the culmination of months of work and knowledge gained working with Drupal and its community over the past 3+ years. I look forward to feedback from the community regarding ReviewDriven, and being able to fund further development of this service and, at the same time, improving the Drupal quality assurance ecosystem.
Since ReviewDriven is a major event in my life and Drupal career it caused me to reflect on how I got to this point. From my humble beginnings in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP), where my testing roots were planted, I received encouragement and mentoring which inspired me to continue working with open source. Previously, I had been interested in contributing to open source, but had never found a place to plug in. Since my start with Drupal I have contributed in a variety of ways to openSUSE, the Linux kernel, and KDE.
After my initial introduction to Drupal, I was received with enthusiasm and the community helped me get to Drupalcon Boston 2008. I took part in the GHOP and SimpleTest presentations. During the coding sprint after the conference, I was approached by Kieran Lal who offered to help me get to a testing sprint in Paris. Again the Drupal community along with some help from Google made it possible for me to attend. Not only was it my first time out of the United States, but I got to spend a few days working closely with some of Drupal's best. During the sprint Drupal took a major step towards realizing automated testing with the introduction of SimpleTest (or rather a fork) into Drupal core.
In the months after the sprint I pushed hard to maintain, add to, and improve the tests in core. At the time patches were committed without much thought given to the tests so keeping the tests passing was a full time job. After discussions with Kieran I ended up taking over the testing.drupal.org (now qa.drupal.org) effort. After a radical redesign and plenty of work we managed to deploy testing.drupal.org and enable integration with the issue queue once we finally got all the tests passing. With the integration also came the adoption of the current "tests always pass" ideology and requirement to include tests with patches which has revolutionized Drupal development. The system even caught some interesting drupal.org bugs.
Again thanks to community support I was able to attend Drupalcon DC and give a presentation with Kieran on the testing saga. The conference was a lot of fun in general and gave me a chance to meet all the people who I had been working with fairly regularly. Later that year I was accepted to Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the second time and I worked part-time for Acquia as an intern over the same summer. After an exciting summer, with help from the community, I attended Drupalcon Paris 2009 where I gave another presentation on SimpleTest and the automated testing system with Kieran. After a productive Drupalcon we deployed the second version of the automated testing system and continued to improve the system.
Before the end of the year I was hired full-time by Examiner to lead their quality assurance effort. The opportunity provided me with first-hand experience on how quality assurance can fit into an enterprise Drupal development workflow. Additionally, I was able to spend a portion of my time improving the automated testing system so that we could enable partial testing of contributed projects. Examiner required a slightly different approach to testing which formed the basis for SimpleTest 7.x-2.x. Examiner sponsored the development team to attend Druaplcon San Francisco 2010 during which I gave a talk at the Core developer summit on Quality Assurance in Drupal 8, a SimpleTest presentation, and a productive BoF on testing.
In addition to the specifics mentioned I have been blessed to work with and learn from many skilled Drupal developers, and to contribute to Drupal core and contrib which has further refined my skills. My Drupal career has been a great learning experience in addition to being fun and exciting. I look forward to continued involvement with and support from the Drupal community!
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