Kevin Bridges

All great Drupal Camps leave participants thinking "what a great value" and "why not more" so to that end we have begun organizing a DBUG Camp in Denver/Boulder area of Colorado towards the last weekend in July. Many details will be forthcoming in the upcoming weeks, but for now I'd like to direct your attention to our Open Call for Logos ... yep, that's right ... we need help getting that killer logo put together so now is the time for you graphical types to shine!

Today was an amazing day in Paris. It's hard to imagine without the pictures, but we all gathered on the first floor of the facility that hosted yesterday's Drupal Camp. A good portion of yesterday was planning and thinking leaving today for massive amounts of hacking and coding. Charlie Gordon, Jimmy Berry, Roel De Meester, Erik Stielstra, Rok Žlender, Károly Négyesi, Miglius Alaburda, Dries Buytaert, Douglas Hubler, myself and our gracious host Ori Pekelman of AF83 gathered for more than 10 hours to solidify the framework that will help lead Drupal to it's next Killer Release.

Primary amongst todays developments was http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=111813 which brought a framework for functional tests to core. This is the culmination of "Three years, one month and twenty four days" according to Károly who also had this to say before he started dancing in his seat:
(12:24:52 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
(12:24:54 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
(12:24:54 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
(12:24:55 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

The Problem

During recent presentations at FOSDEM 2008 and DrupalCon 2008 Boston, founder Dries Buytaert presented the idea of bringing full testing of Drupal Core ( here and here ) to the Drupal community. When a system changes as rapidly as Drupal does, it becomes increasingly important to provide quantifiable reporting on the health of the system so that growth may continue. Without such reporting, Drupal 7 will realize a substantially shorter development cycle before a 7 month code freeze is enacted around July 15th, 2008. This will allow testers and developers a 7 month period to guarantee the quality of Drupal's next major release.

Today was the first official day of the Paris Code Sprint. Approximately 50-60 Drupalers from around the world gathered on the first floor to learn about and discuss Drupal while the sprinters gathered upstairs to solidify and unify our testing efforts. Ori Pekelman of AF83 has been a gracious and entertaining host providing the foundation for a good amount of discussion and coding.

pingVision has generously covered my airfare and hotel accomodations to ensure I am able to contribute to the Automated Testing Code Sprint happening in Paris this upcoming weekend. This is an important event that will help lay the foundation for Drupal's continued growth and evolution. It is a great responsibility and honor to be able to contribute and I look forward to helping make this effort a success. It is the continued effort of progressive companies like pingVision that help prove the Drupal Community is simply the best out there.

In addition, a special thanks goes to Greg Knaddison for his donation and support in this project ... there would simply be no Drupal without people like Greggles in the community.

Kieran just posted a great write-up on How to test 20 000 Drupal 7 core patches followed by Jimmy Berry's posting Paris Coding Sprint - Unit Testing. It summarizes many of the challenges Drupal is facing to be able to provide 100% testing coverage for Drupal core in addition to outlining the details of code sprint in Paris to help gather key developers to provide solutions.

During the code sprint, it is my goal to work closely with Rok Žlender to provide a mechanism for complete automated testing of HEAD in addition to a full reporting of the results in such a way that problems can be addressed and resolved. The issue queue at http://drupal.org/project/issues/Drupaltestbed will be cleaned up with specific resolutions being provided for issue http://drupal.org/node/239542, http://drupal.org/node/239546 and http://drupal.org/node/190987. Awareness of the Unit Testing Plan will need to be implemented into the Automated Testing as well.

[ begin rant ]
A few days ago I posted to the planet about an initiative underway to help get testing in place for core and I must say I am not entirely impressed by the response from the community. Take that with a grain of salt though because, naturally, the Drupal Community Rocks.

Here's the synopsis:
A) There is an organization of volunteers in place poised and ready to write the simpletests we need.
B) The only reason, that I see, they are not doing this is lack of feedback from the Drupal community.

All that you have to do is edit the wiki page at http://groups.drupal.org/node/9625 ... it's only 4 core modules we are all familiar with ... a few moments of your time. We've even taken the liberty of contributing the first set of scenarios that need testing as an example. Take a look at it ... even adding one line will help Drupal. I won't even start bugging you about contributing to the testing initiative regularly ... at least not yet.

What are you waiting for? Drupal needs you.
[ end rant ]

Charlie Gordon of DROP http://cwgordon.com/drop-drupal-rockin-open-participation has offered to help put together the SimpleTests needed by Drupal core. All that we need to do as a community is edit the wiki page at http://groups.drupal.org/node/9625 and provide DROP the information necessary to write the tests. All that we are asking is a few minutes of your time to help suggests the tests that need to be coded ... you don't need to code them yourself.

For those of you with short attention spans, this is a call for co-maintaiers of the Picasa Module and the Auto Assign Role Module.

While at the Drupalcon in Boston I began talking to Kieran and others about my desire to actively participate in making core the best it can be. The focus I now have is to provide a continuous unit testing framework for core so that the proposed Paris Code Sprint can be a success. Make sure to join the Unit Testing Group and the Quality Assurance Group to keep informed of and participate in relevant debates.

The Drupliclown was created by Al Steffen during the Boston Druplicon ... it is recorded here and made available as an svg file for your enjoyment.