1. Expanding Community: Student Involvement in Quality Assurance Testing Josh Baron Director, Academic Technology and eLearning

2. MARIST COLLEGE We are NOT a large research university! Founded 1929 – small complex liberal arts college Located in Poughkeepsie, New York, USA Approximately 5700 students (FTE) 200 full-time faculty, 500 part-time Strategic focus on distance learning

3. QA Overview from 10,000 ft QA = Quality Assurance Process involves: 1.Testing using scripts to identify bugs 2.Fixing those bugs and verifying they were fixed 3.Release new version ( 4.Conducting regression testing to test if bug fixes More at: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/jQ

4. Overview of Marist’s Model Dedicated three part-time (20-hours per week) CS graduate students to QA for 2.4 –Focus was on OSP and Messages & Forums Students are paid $8.50 - $9.50 per hour Students also involved in supporting faculty who are using Sakai

5. Preparing for QA About 2-3 month before QA began (Jan.): –Students began exploring confluence and Sakai –Meetings with students and project coordinator –Got involved in QA and OSP conference calls About 1-2 months before QA began (Feb.): –Conference call with Megan May –Got involved in “preliminary test” – IMPORTANT –Got informal mentoring from OSP leads

6. Engaging in QA Student were dedicated “full-time” (20-hours per week) during formal QA process Students engaged with the community often –The were not initially comfortable doing so –Worked to identify bugs vs. requirements –Sometimes helped ID technical issues Close coordination was required

7. Challenges Latter test scripts often relied on completing earlier ones Students struggled to ID bugs vs. requirements Students need coordination and mentoring Each “tag” release required dropping the database, focusing us to start over

8. Benefits to Marist Great learning experience for students –Worked within open/community source project –Had to work in as a virtual team Focused on areas that were important to us We contributed!!! Kept us close in the loop on tool issues Student were able to train me and my staff

9. Benefits to Community Inexpensive model for adding QA resources Students may be able to dedicate more focused attention to QA Scalable and sustainable model Creates a pipe for potential developer resources

10. Lessons Learned & Recommendations Having a “community mentor” is important Having a local coordinator is important More automated testing is critical Encourage students to reach out for help Could develop global “pass around” model Great way to learn about system and prepare for future development work

11. Sakai.EDU Concept Create opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to engage in work related to the Sakai project for which they receive academic credit. Focus on a range of academic and non- academic topics Possible “Community Award” for student teams

12. THANKS! Megan May – for coordinating Dawn Eckert – for helping us understand OSP and for walking us though the test scripts and how to execute them. Lynn Ward, Chris Maurer, and the Entire Collab Sakai Community – for helping resolve out doubts during the testing process Chris Maurer, Jim Eng – for quick follow to bugs reported on JIRA Tony Camilli, Sheeba Gandhi, Matt Rubins and others – for helping set up the test Environment.