Testing and WebMob (was: [W3C Webmob] Call Tomorrow (19th March) Cancelled)

On mer., 2014-03-19 at 00:12 +0000, SULLIVAN, BRYAN L wrote:
> I’d like to put on the table the concern that the overall testing
> program at W3C has evaporated, or at least retreated into github land
> with no overall plan, organization, or goals.

I don't think that's an accurate characterization of the current
orientation of the testing efforts; before opening the question of what
(if anything) webmob should do in this space, let me summarize what I
understand the current status of testing efforts to be, esp. in
comparison with had been the plans until a few weeks ago.

The work that Tobie accomplished over the past year or so, esp. as a
consequence of the work done in the CoreMob CG (the predecessor of this
group), had two aspects:
* a short-term goal of bringing greater focus and organization to the
ad-hoc work done across groups on testing
* a longer-term goal to develop an ambitious testing program that would
push the envelop of what W3C had been traditionally doing in terms of
testing towards a much more robust kind of testing

The latter had been triggered by various requests from industries to
support their specific needs (esp. TV and Mobile), and was dependent on
getting funds matching the big investment that was required upfront to
enable that type of testing; despite numerous and insistent efforts to
gather such funds, the W3C staff was not able to get a single firm
commitment, let alone commitments matching the scale of the required
investments. As a result, the plans on this front have been set aside;
I'm sure they would be considered again if some funding were to be
offered (but W3C staff will no longer be actively hunting for them).

The former, though, has already had a real big impact on how testing is
being developed in W3C:
* a single repository contains all the tests developed across
browsers-related groups,
* greater consistence around how tests are built, reviewed and
organized,
* a dedicated test runner has been developed to ensure consistency
across runs of these test cases,
* documentations on how to write tests has been collected, published and
made easy to contribute to under the "test the web forward" umbrella
http://testthewebforward.org/
* that same umbrella has continued to host events to create knowledge
and momentum around crowd-sourced test developments

This is already a pretty huge improvement compared to what was before,
and is certainly pretty far from unorganized or aimless.

Now, assuming there is still a need for a more ambitious approach to
testing, assuming there is a particular mobile angle to it (as was
previously discussed in CoreMob), and assuming several WebMob
participants are interested in contributing to its realization, I think
it would make sense to have another task force to work towards that.

If so, it would be useful to get clarity on:
* what would be the mobile-specific goals of the work? we had previously
discussed creating momentum behind more convergence across mobile
browsers, but I think it would be worth looking in more details how that
would work (it could target implementors, developers, standards makers,
…)

* who would be willing to lead such task force and who would be
interested in contributing to it?

(I meant to bring that topic up at our call on Wednesday, but we ran out
of time)

Dom

Received on Friday, 28 March 2014 16:23:22 UTC