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Hi again. We are really busy these days setting up CI infrastructure for our repositories and starting the development of ElasTest, but I’d like to stop for a while and talk to you about how can you contribute to the project. At the end of the day, ElasTest is an open source project from the community for the community, and all the people involved at the moment want to see it succeed. Success in the context of an open source project means gathering community, traction, and interest enough among developers and end-users. Fundamentally this is so that it can survive when the project that is funding its initial development efforts is gone. So, let us briefly go through the different things you can do to contribute to the ElasTest project.

Be an ambassador

You can help us spreading the word about ElasTest. Yes, that simple thing can be a huge step forward. Sometimes we are too busy implementing the project and don’t pay attention to communication activities. It is key to gather community and become a sustainable OSS project by reaching out to everyone that has a true interest in the project. So please, tell your colleagues, tweet about us, subscribe to our YouTube channel and say it so, subscribe to our newsletter (at the bottom of our page) and tweet our blog posts, like and share our slides and presentations. All these things can make people know that the project exists and what we can do for them.

You might be wondering if this project is of interest to your colleagues or if it’s worth sharing the project on a mailing list you’re subscribed to, to let people know about the project. Well, let me clarify this a little more, but in case of doubt, sharing an open source project can’t hurt, can it?. So, these are the main professionals that we believe have a true interest in this project:

• CEOs, CTOs, CFO, and CXOs of software companies in general. Why? Because ElasTest will reduce maintenance and development costs for your software, and it will allow to gain confidence in the product. In the end, people using the products that these companies are building will report less bugs and there’ll be less complaints about the software. Happy users are paying customers!
• Testers. They will leverage ElasTest to run their test suites in an integrated platform that will give them full overview of what’s going on. Testers can instrument test and software to reproduce real-world scenarios through the ElasTest GUI, and they get full integration with the CI server.
• Developers. They can use the services offered by ElasTest within their tests: browsers and mobile emulators as a service, device/actuators as a service, or security as a service for your protocols. Through these they’ll develop faster. They can control and instrument the software under test and the tests themselves by injecting failures to stress the product. All services expose an API developers can use within their preferred testing framework and programming language. No changes needed in your toolchain. Just run your tests on top of ElasTest.

Be a user

You can join us in our users mailing list. Keep us informed of how you plan to use ElasTest, what are your requirements, which features would you like to see implemented in the project. It is very important for us to know what are your needs. This mailing list is for end-users of ElasTest, so please, let us know how can ElasTest help you. We can provide you questionnaires that will help us understand your necessities. You can also ask questions on StackOverflow using the tag ElasTest. Don’t be shy, let us know! We want to help you. Really.

Be a tester

You can contribute to the project helping us to polish our software. Don’t be afraid: checkout our code, and follow instructions in our READMEs to ensure our software can be installed and used. Report bugs in our bugtracker in case the installation instructions don’t work for you, or if you find problems running the software. We need testers also!!

Be a developer

Fix bugs listed in our bugtracker, and provide pull requests. We will check and collaborate with you to help fixing them. You can also ask for advice in our users list and we will assign a mentor to you that will help and guide you on fixing bugs. Currently, it’s too early to contribute code, because are still working on our governance rules, and how to manage property rights in the project. But those things will be ready by the end of June. Come by then and let’s talk about how can you contribute code to the project.

As you see, there are several ways of becoming part of the ElasTest community.

Hurry up, join us!!