CPAN Testers

Much of February was taken up with monitoring updates and watching for any unfortunate consequences. Thankfully the improvements seem to have done their job. The report submissions in January dropped from previous months, which is normal going on past experience, and sure enough the submissions increased again last month. Despite this the builder has managed to stay on top of the page requests. Some fine tuning has taken place and currently the builder stays at most about 2-3 days behind, but is average in only 1-2 days behind. We'd prefer to have updates even more frequent than this, so over the next few months we'll investigate further what improvements can be made.

Recently David Golden had cause to investigate a problem that was surfacing with Module::Build. Some reports to CPAN Testers were highlighting a particular issue that was proving hard to track down. Thankfully, Chad Davis went the extra miles to try and provide David with as much context as possible to understand the problem. It is worthwhile reading David's full post, appropriately title 'How to replicate a failure', as it provides a good example of how testers and authors can work together to solve problems.

The 2011 QA Hackathon is now firmed up, and although work integrating perl smoke test reports into the Metabase is planned, there is nothing specific to CPAN Testers. This is mainly due to David and myself being unable to attend in person, although we both hope to be online at some point during the event.

To end off this summary, the mappings this month included 8 total addresses mapped, of which 7 were for newly identified testers. It seems testers are getting used to reusing their metabase profile, rather than creating a new one every time they change email address, as this was the intention behind the profile, allowing us to more easily attribute reports to a particular tester.

If you have any CPAN Testers related news, blog posts or if you are planning any CPAN Testers related talks at your local Perl Monger group or at a workshop or conference, please let us know, and we'll promote you here on the blog. Until next time...

Cross-posted from the CPAN Testers Blog.