Are you a POSSCON attendee, a newcomer to open source and interested in getting involved in the free and open source community? This POSSCON Bounty is where we’ll outline a quick-and-easy project that needs doing for the Fedora Community. It's a good opportunity to get your feet wet while becoming a part of the talk that Mel Chua and I are doing on Thursday at 4:10pm, "Curious Artifacts: Making FOSS materials make sense to learners."

Design Suite Package Test Cases

The Fedora Design Suite is a ready-to-go Linux desktop environment brimming with the Fedora Design Team's favorite FOSS multimedia production and publishing tools. These are the same programs we use to create all the artwork for Fedora, from desktop backgrounds to CD sleeves, web page designs, app interfaces, flyers, posters and more. From document publication to vector and bitmap editing or 3D modeling to photo management, the Design Suite has an application for you — and you can install thousands more from the Fedora universe of packages. It was recently featured at SXSW and its current release has been downloaded 1800 times in the past 4 months. We're making a re-release of the Design Suite in May to update all the applications there to their latest versions, and want to make sure everything's going to keep on working as expected even with the changes.

Your mission

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a test plan for one or more packages in the Design Suite. (Each application in the Suite, such as The GIMP (a free alternative to Photoshop) or shotwell (a photo manager and my personal favorite), is included in the spin as a package.) Adam Williamson from the Fedora QA team caught us at FUDCON Tempe for his test case hackathon and taught us how to create a test plan for a package - and we'll pass that knowledge on to you, too!

Basically, a test plan is a way of saying "what does it mean for an application to work?" How can we quickly check out if a program has the functionality its users need - does a word processor let you edit a document, does a sound recorder let you mix a couple songs? Much of a test plan is simply playing around with cool software to make sure it works, and then writing down what you did - this means that as a bonus, you'll learn how to use some open source multimedia tools as well. These test plans will be run every time a new version of the Design Suite comes out, so the work you do here will be useful for many future releases.

Adam's already written a guide to writing test cases, but all three of us know that when experienced contributors (like Adam) write documentation, we may unknowingly miss including context newcomers need. We want to walk through creating at test plan with you (and possibly Adam if we can find him online - he's in Vancouver) and have you teach us what the process looks like for a newcomer - because we'd love to be able to have a class of design students, or another group of newcomers, take a look at the rest. You'll be making sure the way is clear for them to follow.

What do you need to know?

Not much - in fact, the less you know about contributing to open source software, the better. You don't have to be a programmer. You don't have to be a technology professional. (Actually, I started the Design Suite project as a high school student.) You don't even have to use Linux.

You should be willing to be adventurous in software-land with us and a few of our friends from Fedora for an hour or so, and brave enough to come up with us in front of an audience on Thursday and share the story of that hour from your perspective. (Don't worry, we'll rehearse with you beforehand!) We love people who are articulate and willing to think out loud to us as they're doing things; when something confuses you, can you explain why, and how we could improve it? You should be bold enough to have your work - including the wrong turns and stumbles we take together - on public display, released under an open license so that we can show others the things we learned from the experience. We'll be there right with you every step of the way.

The Rules

You’ll need a Fedora account to submit your work. Don’t worry, it’s not hard to get, you can sign up for it here, quickly and painlessly: Create a Fedora account. Once you’ve created your account, log in to sign the contributor license agreement (this gives us permission to use your work!)

As part of the exercise, we may do a short interview with you and take a photo at the end. If this happens, the interview and photo will be released under a creative commons license as part of the presentation materials; you'll have a chance to review everything and sign off on the final edit before it becomes public, but we did want to warn you that taking this on will give you a certain degree of publicity. ;-)

What happens next?

If you're interested in being our brave volunteer, comment on this post or tweet/dent my co-presenter Mel @mchua with a sentence on who you are and why you'd like to do this and some indication of where and when you can be found on Wednesday afternoon/evening. We'll pick our volunteer by 1pm EST on Wednesday.

Mel will find you at the conference sometime after lunch on Wednesday and sit you down with a computer that has all the tools preinstalled. The two of us (her in person, me remote in Boston) will coach you through the project. Afterwards, all three of us will discuss how to replay our adventure for Thursday's audience - we think the project will take less than an hour, and the planning discussion another hour, but be prepared to block out 2.5 hours for this just to be on the safe side.

Finally, during our talk on Thursday afternoon, there'll be a part where we call you to take the stage with us and help us tell your story. You'll be helping our audience understand the open source world through the eyes of a newcomer. Not a bad way to get started in open source. :-)

What are you waiting for? Let's get started!