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. Everyone will be asked to team up with someone from the opposite side. 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. ;)

I'm officially headed to Drupalcon Szeged in August (thanks, Lullabot!), and so naturally submitted a few session proposals this weekend. :) Incidentally, if you haven't yet registered for Szeged, you really ought to do so soon -- the price goes up after June 30, and their website has a super smooth registration process.

So in addition to the "usual" Drupalchix BoF and Summer of Code showcase proposals, I also really want to try something new this year in support of spreading the testing love.

So I'm proposing.... Awesome Testing Party, a working session where coders from newbie to ninja gather in a room together and help each other to write tests for Drupal core.... and win prizes! :)

Earlier tonight, Jimmy Berry posted a plea for the Drupal community to clean up their messes in terms of testing. Since Jimmy did a whole bunch of the heavy lifting involved in getting the SimpleTest framework ready to commit to core, a major milestone in Drupal's development, we'd do well to listen to his words and his frustrations when he sees all of his hard work falling apart due to neglect.

SimpleTest has only been in core for a month now, and already we've managed to break more than half the tests. This is a big problem. :\

In order for our community to embrace testing, we're required to bring several hundred people who've never written a test before in their lives (and might not even have heard of automated testing until heard some Drupal people talking about it) up to speed on what testing is, why it's a good thing, and how to do it.

But every time there's a bug in the testing framework, and every time an existing core test fails to run, this serves to completely destroy developers' confidence. If we're lucky, these people will go work on other things for a little while, and then check back periodically to see if things have been sorted things out yet. If we're unlucky, they start to develop animosity and resentment about the very idea of testing, and then start to distance themselves from doing development and encourage others to as well. Either way, the end result is stalling development on D7, and fewer people to spread the work around of writing further tests.

So how can someone concerned about the state of D7 development help?