[Accessibility-testing] 2018 goals review

deborah.kaplan at suberic.net deborah.kaplan at suberic.net
Tue Feb 6 12:48:00 EST 2018


I admit that one of the reasons I have struggled to get traction on this project is that every time we get moving on the Testathon, which is the reason we came together, I end up getting discouraged by pushback against the idea of the Testathon itself. I also admit that the idea was mine in the first place, because I've seen similar projects work successfully in the past, which of course means that I am particularly in favor of running it. ;)

It has not been my impression that our problem is nobody doing work. It was certainly my impression, during the time that I was failing to herd our particular cat colony, that we would become derailed every time we had any kind of philosophical disagreements about the direction we should go, and our motivation would trail off.

I would propose that at this point we have had all of the philosophical discussions, worked through various proposals, and the information is all there for Jason to make some decisions. Let's just let Jason, as our fearless leader twice over, come up with a proposal for what we should now attempt, we can move forward with that. I will personally commit to not arguing whatever his plan is, even if I don't like it. :)

-deborah

On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, Dan Fabulich wrote:
> As I think you've probably seen in the mailing list archives, I've been skeptical of the "Testathon" goal from the start. In particular, I remain very afraid that we'll drag ourselves over the finish line to run a Testathon and file a number of bugs, only to let the bugs sit unfixed for a long time (quite possibly years), wasting the effort.
>
> As a result, I feel that the true value of the project is the documentation we generate on how to test for accessibility issues in general. This is the documentation that developers will use in future years to repeat the testing, reproduce bugs, and verify their fixes.
>
> I especially wince at the idea of covering a "big matrix." We should at least start with a small matrix.
>
> We've really struggled to get individuals to do real work for this project. I'm as guilty as anyone; in September, I thought I'd have a lot of time in November of 2017, but life ate up all my volunteer time and then some.
>
> The problem isn't that we can't get organized. The problem is that nobody's sitting down to do work. We don't have a big list of tasks to put into Trello because we aren't doing any tasks. 
>
> Instead of building a matrix and finding volunteers to cover the matrix, we should start by figuring out our volunteer time budget: how much time is anyone in this group dedicated to doing this week?
>
> If history is any guide, we're going to have approximately one dedicated person at a time, who can spare about one work-day of time at approximately monthly intervals.
>
> On that budget, I claim that we should just have one dedicated person do the testing on a very small matrix. If it were still September, I'd say that this person should be me (and it's possible that this person could still be me, but probably not this month or next).
>
> Overall, in light of our non-accomplishment to date, I think we should not assume that there will be a big increase in volunteer output, and we should plan accordingly.
>
> -Dan
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