This month we hit the 2 millionth post to cpan-testers, thanks to Chris Williams. I congratulated him after his talk in Copenhagen, but he was more relieved to find out that the report itself was a PASS :) I still need to check which was the 2 millionth verified report, but I suspect Chris will claim that too. With such a high volume of reports, it's getting more urgent to move to something other than SMTP. There have been further discussions about updating the transport method and hopefully there should be some movement on that during the latter part of the year. In the meantime, if you're interested in getting involved in the way CPAN Testers gets reported in the future, feel free to join cpan-testers-discuss@perl.org, and add your thoughts.
Having taken over the code that runs the CPAN Testers Reports website, I have been hard at work behind the scenes updating all the code that generates the database and websites. As the CPAN Testers Statistics site worked from an enhanced version of the database, the first hurdle has been to merge the two and ensure both websites can be rebuilt from the same database. Despite a few hiccups with the NNTP server, that part of the process has gone very well. As a consequence several code releases of CPAN-WWW-Testers-Generator have already hit CPAN. The code for the Reports and Statistics site is currently being packaged and will be released soon too. The two sites meanwhile are being heavily tested with the new database, and again all seems to be running smoothly. For some thoughts into my plans for the future of the Reports site, see my use.perl posting.
Last month featured an excursion by many testers to Copenhagen, for the annual YAPC::Europe Perl Conference. Chris Williams presented 'Rough Guide to CPAN Testing', and we held a CPAN Testers BOF at the end of the first day. We had several people along to discuss several aspects of CPAN testing, and Adam Kennedy's PITA idea also got a lot of interest. After the BOF we managed to get a group photo of some of the testers. Next year I hope it will be an even bigger collection of testers :)
Both at the end of Chris' talk and during the first set of Lightning Talks, JJ and I announced that with the support of Birmingham.pm, we would be hosting the second QA Hackathon in Birmingham. We have already spoken to several people, who we hope will be able to attend, and we're hoping a few others will also be able to get involved too. More details will be announced in due course, but expect more CPAN Testers work to be involved in the hackathon.
Again we had over 100 testers submitting reports last month, with 49 new addresses mapped, of which we had 16 new testers identified. Once I've got the current work out of the way, my plan is to graph the number of new and core testers we see each month. I'm interested to see what effect the promotion of CPAN Testers at major events, or significant online promotions, have on the uptake of new testers. After that I hope to look at the platforms tested in a little more depth.
While trawling the back catalogue of articles on the NNTP server, in order to verify the database was building correctly, I uncovered a couple of posts from Brian King; FAQ First Draft Thread and FAQ Second Draft Thread. Interesting to see we still have the same basic principals of CPAN Testing now :)
