October 21 - Testing Testing Trial

This will be an informal gathering of drupal people who will work together to try to understand 'tests' and how to write them.

Where

Common Roots, www.commonrootscafe.com
2558 S Lyndale Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55405

When

Wednesday, October 21, 7:00 pm - 9:30pm
(and then of course we're taking zzolo out for bon voyage drinks. Interested others: rendezvous at common roots around 9:30pm to go out. location TBD.)

What to bring

You will need: a computer, code editor, some familiarity with drupal & PHP. You will probably also want a local webserver running.

We will probably be checking out drupal 7 cvs repositories - but don't worry if you can't do that stuff yet - that's the point of getting together to do these things. We can suggest programs you can install that will help that. And worst case scenario, we can just put recent Drupal 7 on a flash drive for you.

What would be *great* to bring

• More information about testing. Read up about testing before coming. But again, don't stress out too much - the whole point of this meeting is to work together on something that sounds unpleasant, something we procrastinate about learning, something we do not do because we can't fathom how to integrate testing with our actual daily work life...

  So instead we'll get together, eat lemon bars and try to spend our time learning and at least making some progress to *clarify* testing.

• URLs to some recent requests for tests in the Drupal issue queue. (Note: in my experience it can take *hours* to find an issue that you can actually work on in a short period of time. If you find some candidates, by all means post them on this thread.)
• Here is the issue queue, with the word 'test' and 'Novice' tag: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search?text=test&projects=&assigned=&su...

What we can do

• Demonstrate what we already know about tests in Drupal to each other. Spend some time reviewing the issue queue to find requests for tests and find a small projects.
• Set up testing environments (http://drupal.org/node/28245) -- note, this is very similar to what you have to do to test patches. We can do this together, basically you get the bleeding edge version of Drupal 7 running locally - and then you can apply patches or tests to that.
• Draft up some more help/documentation for this page: http://drupal.org/contribute/testing.

OK so again, please comment if you intend to come. And if you can't come but are interested in this - we shall meet again.
Probably in December.
And maybe we will be able to explain testing... :)