How YOU (yes, you!) can make Drupalcon's "Awesome Testing Party" awesome

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. ;)

Wow, you made it this far? Cool. Well here are my Drupalcon Szeged Sessions:

1. Testing part 1: Intro to testing, Wednesday, August 27 @ 3pm: Testing gurus Florian "flobruit" Loretan and Charlie "cwgordon7" Gordon will teach you the ropes on how automated testing works. I'll be there too on the sidelines making sarcastic comments. ;)
2. Drupalchix BoF, Wednesday, August 27 @ 4pm. This is a BoF break-out for the women in Drupal to meet other women in Drupal and talk about our backgrounds, how to address challenges, or whatever else we feel like.
3. Testing, part 2: Awesome Testing Party, Thursday, August 28 @ 9am: This session is for everyone who has ever written a lick of PHP. Learn hands-on how to write automated tests, with the testing experts in the Drupal community on-hand to help, and win fabulous prizes!
4. The DROP Program, Thursday, August 28 @ 4pm. I'll be joining Charlie "cwgordon7" Gordon to talk about the DROP initiative, which highlights low-hanging fruit tasks in the Drupal community to help give new contributors an easy place to dive in.
5. SoC Showcase, Friday, August 29 @ 9am. Students and mentors will be there to show off the awesome work from this year's Summer of Code projects.
6. Drupal Association Panel, Saturday, August 30 @ 9am: Got questions about the Drupal Association? We've got answers.

Lots of early mornings. :P Should be nice and zombied out by the code sprint. ;)

Hope to see you in Szeged!