At last UDS we discussed about The LoCo Testing, and about what we made in the Italian LoCo Team. Most of the info already passed through the mailing lists so I don’t need to put all the data here.
What I would like to analyze further is the results of a little survey I made for the Italian Testing Team, just before the UDS. Let’s take a look:
I asked to all people subscribed to the mailing list to fill the survey, even if they aren’t approved member of the team. (to be approved member you need to keep testing, you expiry from the team if you miss two milestone in a row). 64% of the people who filled the survey were members.
I also asked the age. This is really interesting in my opinion. As you can see, being an online activity is something that fit well with all ages. We’ve contributors ranging from teenagers to mature people. This is powerful! Most of the LUGs I know keep saying that they are missing new generation, and that they’re getting too old.
With this question I wanted to check if we had a concentration from a specific area of the country or if we were well distributed. As you can see we’re present in all the part of our country, from the North, to center and South, and in both islands (Sicilia and Sardegna). The region who haven’t any contributor are the smallest region so it looks like a physiological thing (except maybe for Trentino Alto Adige. Anybody out there?).
Here you can see two main facts: testing brings people to start contributing Ubuntu (46,4%), also testing is not a thing for just new-comers, it’s a nice and interesting activity also for experienced contributors (35,7%).
Another indicator about the value of the team: 46,4% of them work also in another Free Software Project. We’ve people who contribute to upstream or other free software associations. That’s good, because it brings energy to Ubuntu from outside, and also get the Ubuntu spirit and experience going to other’s FS project.
Last indicator. People who do tests do also other things (60,7%) in Ubuntu. This show that a testing team is appealing to people involved in other Ubuntu areas, and also that testing bring new contributors to Ubuntu (4th question) who eventually would start contributing also in other ways.
What’s the point?
If you are a LoCo Leader you should *seriously* consider to start a testing team inside your LoCo. It will give you an healthy online activity which will bring people to your LoCo, and will make people more experienced about Ubuntu development process. They will learn how to report effective bugs, and will become more skilled and effective in helping newcomers. Also, being a pure online activity it will bring people from all around the country to your LoCo.
We have the Testing High Score in the Hall of fame, so will be very funny trying to compete in testing between countries. Natty Alpha1 is out there, I dare you, try to beat us! 🙂
Paolo Sammicheli's Blog 