Beautiful Testing

Volunteers

The tiny group of people working on the Mozilla Calendar Project in the beginning were either computer scientists or had been around software development long enough to know the jargon. We did not anticipate that our users and volunteers would be much different from us. The first time we got asked the question “What is QA?”, we realized exactly how wrong we were about our ideas of the typical volunteer. Arcane jargon did not inspire people. We had some people who did QA as their daily job volunteering their time, but they wanted something different than “QA.” Replacing the idea of “QA” with “testing” didn’t work either. We began asking the volunteers who showed up in the channel what had brought them to the project and what they wanted to gain from it. The two primary reasons for being involved were “giving back to open source” and “being a part of the project.” We worked hard to create and maintain an open, welcoming group identity, which eventually became an inseparable part of the Calendar Project’s DNA.

“Volunteering” (from Latin voluntarius, “of one’s free will”) is a concept that implies working for a project without being motivated by financial or material gain. From this definition, the following questions arise: why are people interested, what are they interested in, and what could be achieved? The community includes individuals with a variety of prior knowledge regarding testing software and quality assurance. It ranges from the novice user with basic general ...