Wednesday, March 03, 2010

EuroSakai: Sakai QA and How to get Involved

Alan Berg, Anthony Whyte, Jean-François Lévêque, and I finished our final two presentations at the EuroSakai Valencia 2010 conference today. The overall theme of these presentations was "Get Involved". The presentations are What is Sakai QA and 10 ways to make a good Sakai release (my apologies to the attendees but 8:30am is just too early for a session). I hope that our main point got across and I hope we provided helpful information for those brave enough to attend.
A few highlights for those who could not make it:
  • Alan did another Mexican wave
  • I (and others) was still half asleep during the morning session
  • Jean-François made a lot of food related jokes
  • lolcatz were involved
Our major theme was "Blood and Treasure" (stolen from Anthony Whyte). If you have assets (people) then you have blood to contribute. If you are looking for ways to get involved please consider these opportunities. If you answer yes to any of these questions, or even if you don't, you may want to sign up to participate in one of these teams.
  • Sakai Maintenance Team - are you a java developer? an SVN wizard? want to learn more about Sakai codebase? do you love issue management and/or JIRA? do you like to write unit tests?
  • Release Management - are you a master of subversion? do you have a passion for merging code? are you running a 2.*.x branch in production?
  • Quality Assurance - can you use a web browser? do you like trying every little thing in software? are you tired of hearing complaints from users after you upgrade?
The other primary and very critical way to get involved is with treasure. If you have some money you can spend on open source and/or Sakai then you have treasure. Consider putting this money into foundation dues or buying into commercial support. Check out the end of the What is Sakai QA presentation for a few options to get involved when you have money but no people (or if you have money AND people).
One final point from our talk. If you are involved, thank you. If you see others who are involved, please thank them.

1 comment:

Evandro Pires Alves said...

I would like to help more on the Maintenance team or the QA team, but my institution doesn't have the blood or the money... :-| I feel sad writing this...