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Quiz and questions community testing day

From MoodleDocs

I am proposing this as an experiment. I want to give it a try, and if it is successful, we may repeat it in future. This idea is shamelessly copied from the Mozilla community.--Tim Hunt 10:00, 24 August 2006 (CDT)

What

The idea is for some of us to get together online to do some testing on Moodle 1.7dev, so we can work out what are the key bugs to fix before the release.

If you have not been able to try it yet, this would be a good chance for you to try out some of the new Moodle 1.7 features, with friendly people around to help you get started.

My reasons for doing this are mostly selfish :-). I want as many people as possible to test the Moodle 1.7 quiz before it is released, so we can find the bugs before it is released, rather than afterwards. Also, there are over 200 open quiz bugs in the Moodle bug tracker, and I could use some help going through them and sorting them. I can't work on 200 bugs at once.

As a means of communicating, we can use the OU's FlashMeeting server, which gives us audio and video conferencing, and text chat for anyone with a web browser with the Flash plugin installed. As a fallback we can use the Quiz Forum too. And that is the other reason for doing this. I have got to know some of you a bit through the forums, and it would be nice to get to know you a bit better. (I think ;-))

When

Date

I am on holiday for the first week in September. Moodle 1.7 is due to be released near the end of September. Therefore, I would like to hold this in September soon after my holiday.

If you are interested, please indicate below which dates you would join in on. If possible, indicate they by 14:00UTC on Thursday 31st August, so I know what is happening before I disappear.

Monday 11th September
Tim Hunt | Jeff Forssell (Maybe other days too)|Pierre Pichet(Maybe other days too)
Wednesday 13th September
Tim Hunt
Friday 15th September
Tim Hunt
Saturday 16th September
Tim Hunt
Monday 18th September
Tim Hunt
Tuesday 19th September
Tim Hunt | Jeff Forssell
Wednesday 20th September
Tim Hunt
Friday 21st September
Tim Hunt

Time

I get the impression that most people who are interested in the quiz are in Europe and America, therefore, my suggestion is that we start 14:30 UTC, and go on for some hours until we get bored. (I expect day in the page title is an overstatement!) People in Japan/Autralia/New Zealand will probably only be able to make it for the start, and people in America will probably only join as some way in.

Note that you can ask Google things like time now in Darwin Australia, and you can get current UTC here: http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl.

Please feel free to comment on my suggested time. Perhaps list your time zone below:

Tim Hunt: UTC+1 Jeff Forssell: UTC+2 (an earlier time would be better for me)

The goals of the session

Help people set up test installs of 1.7dev

It is helpful to me if lots of people know how to set up their own test installation of Moodle, so that the changes I make get tested on the widest range of combinations of web server, PHP version and database. That way, I get to hear about problems sooner rather than later.

Installing your own version of Moodle may seem like a big deal to some people, but acutally it is quite easy, particularly with other people there to help out.

A list of the servers available for testing

(unless you want to set the list elsewhere)

Pierre Pichet

I will update daily my working site ( Windows XP , PHP 5, Mysql 5) with two versions of 1.7.

  1. http://132.208.141.198/moodle_head/ with the latest release of moodle HEAD (unless you want a specific 1.7 one)
  2. http://132.208.141.198/moodle_head_exp/ with a recent release containing all my code proposals on calculated questions, import and export of questions and edit question interface.

The sites are accessible as user=moodle user password=moodle. I will set a course for the tests. I will also set similar working sites (Solaris, PHP 4, MySQL5) with two versions of 1.7. They will be accessible the same way.

  1. http://www.chimie.uqam.ca/moodle_head/
  2. http://www.chimie.uqam.ca/moodle_head_exp/

Triage open quiz bugs

As I said above, there are huge nubmers of quiz bugs in the database, and we need to find the ones where fixing them will give the most benefit. So we need to go through the reports and

  • Check that the problem still occurrs in the current version of Moodle. If not, close the bug.
  • If it does, work out some repeatable steps to reproduce and add them to the bug report.
  • Tidy up the bug reports. Make sure the issue type, priority, etc. are right.

Start developing a rigorous test plan for the quiz

Around the time of the 1.6 release, someone started this wiki page: Tests/Quiz. We could add to it.

I have been working on a collection of test questions. I am working towards having a complete set of examples of each question type that use all the available features, but my list is not complete yet. Also, I need to start doing the same with a set of test quizzes that test all the available options in various combinations, then create a backup course containing all those examples.

Also, I have started using a cool Firefox plugin called Selenium-IDE for automating some quiz tests. I could help people get started with it if they were interested.

Maybe fix some bugs

I think that actually fixing bugs won't be the highest priority while we are all online, but perhaps will will be able to.

Have fun

I hope the session will be enjoyable for all the participants.