3

During the commitment process, Alan and Justin both mentioned that sqa absorbing the old testing.stackexchange.com site (which I believe is a SE1.0 site?) would be worth looking into. Alan is a moderator there, and Justin the administrator there, so it's not just passers-by that are considering this. Obviously Alan has been quite a resource on sqa (on both main and meta) and Justin is in the top 10 users here.

Now, their comments were made in September 2010. I don't know if they still feel that way or not. I also don't know what steps have been taken to secure the testing site for the long term, and what it's licensing terms are. The rate of questions on testing.se is fairly low, but I still think it would be worth looking into.

Anyone have any thoughts/insight into this matter? What is the best way to approach this? I saw testerab bring word to that site of the impending beta, but that's all I've seen on this in the last 6 months.

4

I think there are some good discussions over there that we could migrate, but we wouldn't want to copy everything. Also - what would we do with upvotes?

I suppose it's something to discuss with the SE folks, but I could see bringing over every question with more than n upvotes (and the top nn answers) or something like that.

If SE doesn't have some way to do that automatically, it wouldn't be a huge effort to do it manually.

  • I personally would be comfortable allowing users who transferred their profile (assuming their compatible) or who linked their old one with this one (assuming that's possible) to receive rep (full? half? something else?) for questions and answers that were migrated. And I agree that while I don't know the specifics of how the posts are stored, I bet it wouldn't be difficult to throw together a migration script - I'm PRETTY sure it already exists, but I don't know whether or not it does a complete merge, or just a selected merge. – corsiKa♦ Jun 7 '11 at 19:48
  • ... continued... You're right though, everything coming over is probably not the best option. For instance, there are many meta questions on it, and obviously if the questions were closed or otherwise lower quality, we wouldn't want to bring those over. Excellent points. – corsiKa♦ Jun 7 '11 at 19:49
  • 2
    I'm not worried about rep as much as content - but others may see it differently if we bring their content over without their permission. One thing we could do is identify the best questions from testing.stackexchange and make sure we 1)invite those folks to join this community if they're not already here, and 2) invite them to migrate selected questions (They could copy and paste, or we could ask them to just re-ask the question). – Alan Jun 7 '11 at 19:55
4

Personally, I'm all for this. I originally committed to the Selenium SE, but was happy when it merged with SQA (which I didn't know about). I don't know about all of the other testers/test teams out there, however, on my team:

  • We write and execute manual test scripts when required
  • We perform exploratory testing whenever possible
  • We create test automation when none exists
  • We modify test automation when required
  • We participate in code reviews
  • We sit down with the developer and step through code line by line when they can't figure out how to fix a bug
  • We look at faults and failures and ways to correct them

All of this is part of testing. More and more, I see us becoming specialized generalists, which personally, I'm fine with. And, if I can find answers to any of these area's on one site, all the better.

  • 2
    +1 - Should this be part of our FAQ on what SQA/Testing people do, as well as wiki? It's an excellent list of things a testing team or tester does. My team doesn't get to be involved in developer code reviews or step-throughs, but on the flip side we're very active in trying to prevent design bugs and do a lot of work with project/program managers to clarify requirements and find gaps in design. – Kate Paulk♦ Jun 9 '11 at 10:49
3

I worked with Justin to extend the testing.stackexchange site so it would not shut down. I also worked with Alan to make sure that "testing" was part of the SQA proposal. But ultimately, the testing.stackexchange site just did not have a vibrant enough community to import it into this site.

The site has not had a new question with an up-vote in almost two months. There are 9 users with +200 reputation. There might be some good content there; It's not for me to say. But the technical challenges and side-effects of doing a small import of this nature would make a mess of this site. It's just not advisable.

The disposition of the the site is really up to Alan. If you like a question, you may be able to ask it over here. But the content of testing.stackexchange was not licensed under Creative Commons, so you can't really copy entire content verbatim.

  • I hadn't considered the licensing aspect. I really like Alan's idea of trying to communicate with the users with quality content over there and talking to them about migrating here. – corsiKa♦ Jun 7 '11 at 21:40

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .