A very late summary, and that dispite one of my aims for this year was to get better at posing these on time :( As a consequence, if anyone is willing to help out with posting summaries, please get in touch.

For this post, I want to concentrate on promotion of CPAN Testers. Mark Keating wrote a very eloquent post regarding how testers themselves can promote CPAN Testers, with his post Smoke me an Onion baby. A few years ago, BinGOs and myself toyed with the idea of getting a T-shirt sorted to give out at YAPCs, promoting CPAN Testers. Unfortunately, we couldn't think of a suitable tag line and we're not graphic artists, so we never got anything sorted. In Mark's post he came up with some wonderful graphics to be used as badges for testers to promote their own involvement. If you like Mark's creations and wish to use them on your website, please get in touch and he'll provide copies for you to use. In the meantime watch out for stickers and badges at various future events.

Over the past few months, we have some interest from a few companies that have expressed a desire to support CPAN Testers. Both via monetary funding and spare capacity on servers. We are still in discussion with these companies, so hopefully we will have some new sponsors in the near future. We are always will to have more companies support us, as alhough individual funding is very much appreciated, we would like to see more corporate sponsorship to help raise our profile. If your company uses Perl, and makes use of CPAN Testers either directly or inderectly, and would be willing to help support the long term future of CPAN Testers, please get in touch.

Individual funding, as mentioned, is always very much appreciated, and if you would like to contribute in any way, you can make donations via the CPAN Testers Fund, or Gratipay. All proceeds are managed for us by the Enlightened Perl Organisation, who are a not-fot-profit organisation.

The reason for promotion, and requests for sponsorship, has come about as the Birmingham Perl Mongers' funding of the CPAN Testers servers comes to an end in September 2015, when we'll need to find other sources of funding for the current server. On top of this we have the Metabase server, which also requires funding. Sadly dedicated servers don't come cheap these days, so it roughly costs around £4200 (US$6280 or €5800) per year. Over the next six months we'll be doing as much as we can to raise the funding, but if you can help promote this to your employers that would be wonderful.

If you have any ideas to help promote CPAN Testers in other ways, please let me know and we'll see what we can do.

To begin with, a huge thank you to Nestoria, who selected CPAN Testers as their module of the month. Although we kind of break the mould of a module, we are exceptionally grateful for the donation via Gratipay, and for the promotion. As mentioned several times over the last few months, CPAN Testers are looking towards companies to help fund the servers we currently run, so donations from companies such as Nestoria are very gratefully received, and hopefully will help us to continue for many years to come. It is also nice to hear how CPAN Testers helped them too, when releasing Number-Format-SouthAsian.

We have been in discussions with a few other people and will have further announcements about sponsors and donations soon, but in the meantime, if you or your company would be willing to make a donation to CPAN Testers, you can do so via Gratipay, The CPAN Testers Fund, and/or by contacting me (Barbie), and we'll make sure you get suitable recognition for your contribution.

During December some initial thoughts were put together in preparation for the QA Hackathon 2015. The event in Berlin brings together several key people within CPAN Testers, as well as CPAN and Test communities, and will be an ideal opportunity to look at how we are processing the reports. In the first instance, I want to re-engineer the way the feeds are read, and how pages are built. Working with MessageQueues and Enterprise Service Buses recently, has hightlighted that we can make use of these technologies to speed processing up. As a consequence, I now have some areas of coding that I plan to start before the Hackathon, and hopefully provide some key parties a chance to review and improve the designs.

Although happening in January, I did want to pick up on an outage that happened earlier this month. My thanks to Bytemark for helping to resurrect the server for us. Thankfully, only one index table was knocked out, but after rebuilding, everything does appear to be back on track. Another task for the QA Hackathon is to look at a better way to reduce the risk for these indices. We also want to hopefully plan a move to MongoDB for the Metabase, which will stablise things considerably.

Sadly once again a bit delayed this month, but I do promise to improve in the coming months.

So last month saw the London Perl Workshop take place. Several talks related to testing, and plenty of interest in CPAN Testers. Mark Keating and crew were videoing many of the talks. Sadly the microphone position meant the volume is quite low in places, but they are still worth watching. You can see testing talks from myself (slides), DrForr, and additionally my lightning talk (slides). If you missed the event, there are plenty of great talks you can now catch on the Shadowcat channel.

Also during last month there have been several fixes to the Reports Builder. Also following some conversations at LPW, I came away with a few ideas to improve the performance of the Feed and Builder components so that we can get almost real time production of reports. Over the coming months and likely during the 2015 QA Hackathon, I aim to work more on this and hopoefully have a solution working around the hackathon. Karen Etheridge also help to spot a fault with the Admin site, in that if a tester hasn't allocated a contact email address, any report that has been flagged isn't allocated to them, but to the Admin user. It does mean there is a bit of extra work for me at the moment, but ultimately I need to rework the way testers are notified, particularly in the event of the system using an old email address. If you've flagged any reports and haven't seen them removed as yet, please give me a nudge and I'll approve their removal.

One person I would to single out for making a great effort to promote testing in general, is Sinan Unur, who has been writing some great blog posts. TDD is all well and good, but who's testing the tests?, You've gotta quotemeta! and Tests should not fail due to EOL differences across platforms to mention a few. He has some great in depth Perl posts, and all are well worth reading.

A colleague of mine, Matt Wheatley, recently had a blog post published about how he works in development. Except the post isn't so much about how he works, but more about the value of a QA Department. Our QA team is awesome, and we perhaps rely on them a bit too much sometimes, but I imagine there are many awesome QA teams out there, and this is just one tribute to them all. I especially liked the reference to Bill Sempf's tweat.

We had another Metabase overflow last month, which means we've filled another bucket in AWS. David Golden has created a new one, but it does mean we need to think about moving to our newer architechure sooner rather than later. David, Neil Bowers and I have been in discussions recently, and I hope we will get some movement towards this in the coming year. There will be a lot of changes needed, both to code and routing, so it won't be a simple change. However, it will be a change that will help us grow more productively in the future.

More new coming next month. And my New Year's Resolution is to get these summaries out a bit more on time!

Sorry October's summary is a bit late, as I had rather a busy few months recently, and finding time to finish this one prove more tricky than normal.

However, first off, a thanks to Gabor Szabo, as one of his screencast featured a brief explanation of how CPAN Testers are intergrated into MetaCPAN. Although anyone familiar with the CPAN Testers Report site, will probably have understood what the numbers mean, the screencast is a handy help to anyone new to MetaCPAN or CPAN to learn more about using MetaCPAN. If anyone else has similar screencasts about CPAN Testers, or wishes to create one, please let me know.

My thanks to Pete Houston for notifying me early in the month that the feed to CPAN Testers had got stuck. Another reason why we really want to move away from Amazon and SimpleDB. This is still being investigated, and hopefully will be a project during the QA Hackathon next year. It also gave me pause to think of better ways the feed and builder could be processing. Thet are both mostly serial process, although there are now 2 builders (distros and authors). However, having worked a lot with MessageQueues over the last year, I'm looking at rewriting both the feed and builders, and again is likely to be my main project during the QA Hackathon in 2015. The ultimate aim, as has been asked on many many occassions, is to try and get as close to real time as we possibly can. On a good day we are less than an hour behind, but being a minute of two behind would be even better.

Karen Etheridge highlighted some problems with the CPAN Testers Admin site. Firstly the login had broken again. I've now permanently fixed this, and uploaded the code to CPAN so the old version doesn't overwrite the new version again. However, Karen also spotted a few other problems. Next up was the find a report by GUID. I'm not quite sure what I tested before, but I suspect I overwrote the working code again :( Again this is now fixed and the code is on CPAN :)

The current CPAN Admin problem is figuring out why, when marking reports for removal, they aren't getting alerted to the tester. They were getting added to the Admin user though, so they weren't lost, but it has highlighted a few cross-reference points that are not being made. Connecting a report to tester, or more imporantly to the tester's current email address is not always straight forward, so the fallback is to email the Admin user. I'm working on the code to reconcile these cross-references better, and in the coming weeks I should get that working properly again. In the meantime if you have marked reports, please bear with me, and I'll get to them as soon as I can. In the process of digging through the report removal process, I also discovered that the Builder mechanism for this was flawed, at least from an Author perspective. I've since corrected this too.

Andreas König noted that several reports from one tester were essentially the same. Breno G. de Oliveira helped to identify the problem, and the reasoning behind it. The reporter for cpanminus, doesn't currently record history as the other smokers, and consequently doesn't filter out repeated attempts by the author to install the same distribution. Breno is planning to work more on the Common Client, and integrate this into the cpanminus Reporter. So if you get similar repeated reports, please be gentle with the tester :)

Subramanian Karunanithi was the casualty of version numbering with CGI-Test. Thanks to some investigation work from Jonas B. Nielsen, he highlighted the latest version was 0.52, but the installed version was 0.104. The problem with version numbering within the installers is that they see 0.104 as Zero Point One Hundred and Four, which is greater than Zero Point Fifty Two. Karen posted a bug report, and Alex Tokarev has now released version 1.000, so all good. However, it does bear repeating that Version Numbers Should be Boring.

Next month we'll have a few notes about LPW, more fixes to the toolchain and some ideas for the future.

September featured two hot-topic discussions regarding CPAN Testers. 

The first was started by brian d foy, in a post about the effects of the development version of Test::More, which due to ongoing comment issues, were followed up separately. I see both sides of the argument, but I tend to side with brian. Testers need to take some responsibility when they are testing, particularly when it means testing releases, which may be experimental. However, it's tricky as there is no guarantee way of spotting the dependecy that is at fault. It could be the development release, but equally it could be another regular release. In fact this question has cropped up before where no development release was involved. To understand what is at fault requires human intervention. Programmatically we could try and guess, but it is likely we would get it wrong, just as much as we do now. As such I am looking at changing the Admin site to allow authors and testers to reallocate reports to another distribution. 

During the discussion ribasushi suggested expanding the report grades to handle these sorts of scenario. However, this doesn't get away from the fact that reports are attributed to the wrong distribution. It also confuses the issue for users and authors. The current system is very defined. It may be wrong on occasions, but that's something we can look at fixing. Expanding the grades is more likely going to detract the value of CPAN Testers. If we can improve the current analysis this is a much better result for all.

The second discussion, which started from a thread from August, was prompted by Philippe 'BooK' Bruhat around providing CPAN Testers machines available to test distributions on less popular OSes, so that we can ensure a decent amount of coverage for these OSes. The problem is that the CPAN Testers Fund doesn't currently have the funds available to support this. Its a great idea, and possibly something we can think about for the future, should funds ever be sufficient, but not right now.

If you have some free cycles on a less popular OS, and are willing to run a CPAN Testers client, please do so. As mentioned in the last post, there are several OSes we would love to see getting more test reports attributed to them. The OSes themselves are still widely used, and if you are having any problems setting up a client, please join the mailing list and ask for help and advice.

It was quite timely for BooK to mention the CPAN Testers Fund, as this year is the last year Birmingham Perl Mongers can fund the CPAN Testers server. After 8 years Birmingham Perl Mongers no longer have funds too cover the yearly costs of the reports server, and we will be completely reliant on the CPAN Testers Fund or gracious support from hosting companies to continue the service after September 2015.

I would like to take this moment to say thank you to the Birmingham Perl Mongers for the allowing me to support CPAN Testers for this long with their donations. Without their support, CPAN Testers would not have grown into the dynamic resource it is today. Thank you.

However, what happens next? As it currently stands the CPAN Testers will not be able to pay for the server next year. We could try and raise funds via crowdfunding sources, such as gratipay, but this very time consuming and realistically longer term we really need the support of major companies. Does your company use Perl, CPAN and/or CPAN Testers? Would they be willing to fund in part or full, the servers used to run the systems? If so, please get in touch. If you are a hosting company and would be willing to provide a server of our current spec or better, please get in touch and I can give you the specs for the current server and/or current costs to maintain the existing servers.

It would be a great shame to lose CPAN Testers, so if your company could help, please speak to your marketing department, owners or directors to see whether they are willing to donate. As a thank you, we do provide logos and links on all the primary CPAN Testers sites on the main servers, back to our sponsors websites and they will get thank yous in press releases on social media. Please get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions and hopefully we can keep CPAN Testers alive for many more years to come.

Apologies for posting this late, my laptop has sadly blown up, and I've had to rewrite my original post. More news next month.