The stats for last month are now online. In the next few days, Chris Williams will be the first tester to have submitted over 100,000 test reports. Considering he only recently got involved with CPAN Testers, compared to most testers, that is a phenomenal amount. Not to be too out done, David Cantrell and Andreas Koenig are now regularly contributing over 1000 reports each month.
It was good to get some interest at the CPAN Testers BOF at YAPC::NA last week, as several people approached me saying they were interested in setting up a test box. My "How To Be A CPAN Tester" talk (which was meant to have been co-presented with David Golden) hopefully gave enough of the basics, to get a feel for the value of contributing. I also included several places to get more info, including the new CPAN Testers Wiki, so I'm looking forward to seeing some new email addresses in the coming months. We already had several new testers last month, which is very encouraging. However, we're still not seeing as many perls and platforms being tested as I'd like. I'm going to try and find ways to promote that a little more, and see whether we can help testers extend their testing.
There were a few suggestions for different stats, but I'm not sure I'll implement them all. I am thinking about improving the presentation though, as I don't think I'm presenting the site in the best way possible, although with all my other tasks on my todo list, it might be a while before I get around to that.
While at YAPC::NA, I finally got to meet Adam Foxson, author of Test::Reporter. Between Adam, David and I, we have a few ideas to help collaborate the different methods of performing CPAN Testing and the reporting process. At the moment, Test::Reporter relies on email sending capabilities, but I've previously implemented a patch to allow writing to flat files, and Adam has a HTTP mechanism up his sleeve. David has several ideas to split out the report code from CPAN::Reporter, which will make it alot easier to implement those features in CPAN::YACSmoke. Then my next plan for CPAN::YACSmoke is to implement optional plugins for either the CPAN or CPANPLUS tool chain. With PITA taking a massive step closer, the integration between all these parts of the toolset is going to make the development work behind CPAN Testing very interesting over the next year.
If you're interested in getting involved, aside from patches welcome, there will be some sort of mailing list being instigated that will be specifically for CPAN Testers development work. It hasn't been created yet, but it's been discussed several times, so expect more news on that soon.
