Planet SoC

The Drupalcon Szeged schedule just went up last week. It’s jam-packed with interesting sessions ranging from low-level geeky goodness to design and usability sessions, to Drupal business best practices. And the BoF schedule is filling up with tons of interesting stuff, too.
A list of the sessions I’m leading/partaking in follows the break. But first! I need your help!
Something we’re doing this time around is an experiment in community swarming: the Awesome Testing Party. The aim is for both new and established contributors to learn how to write automated tests (and how to contribute to Drupal in general) by practicing with real tests that need writing for Drupal 7, with members of the “Drupal Testing Brigade” on-hand to help answer questions.
It’ll work like this:

• People who don’t know anything about testing will attend the Intro to Testing session on the first day.
• The next morning, tons of people show up and get some delicious Hungarian pancakes. While they’re having breakfast, the testing team will do a quick 10-minute overview on how to write a test as a refresher.
• After the demo, we split the room into “half”: people who’ve written patches on one side, people who haven’t on the other. People on one side will be asked to team up with someone from the other. We’ll jiggle things around so everyone has a partner.
• Each of the pairs runs up, grabs a card with an issue node ID on it from the ever-growing TestingParty08 pool, and runs back to their laptops. Using the provided hand-outs, and calling on testing experts for one-on-one help, they work together to create a test for their issue.
• Once finished, they roll a patch, attach it to the issue, then come up and get another card… AND… some chocolate! Repeat until there are no more cards! :) At the end, we’ll have dorky prizes for pairs with the biggest chocolate collection!

So as you can see, in order for this session to be a complete success, we must have the following:

1. Tons and tons of people there. I mean like TONS of people. New contributors, old contributors, doesn’t matter. If you’ve written one lick of PHP, you should be at this session. It’ll be crazy fun.
2. Chocolate! What entices people to write tests more than delicious chocolate from all over the world? Nothing, that’s what! So if you’re coming to Szeged, please bring some chocolate with you! It doesn’t need to be anything fancy (though it does need to be in an unopened package ;)), just a candy bar or whatever. The idea is simply to amass an enormous collection of chocolate from all over the world, and hand it out to people as a reward for completing tests.

So yes. Please come to the testing party, and please bring chocolate to share. We’ll do our best to get the critical test queue down to 0, but either way we’ll go home with our sweet tooth satisfied. ;)
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