Many hands make light work
How I groomed a new team to handle 3.x E2E tests at OpenMRS
My previous summer was spent with Google Summer of Code, working with OpenMRS. The project was to develop E2E tests for the OpenMRS 3.x Refapp. After which I continued contributing to the project for several weeks before taking a brief break to focus on publishing my research project. When I returned three weeks later, there had been no progress on the project, and it was in the same state as when I left. The entire project depended on me, and there was no one else to develop or lead it. There was a huge chasm there, which I noticed.
To address this issue, I considered forming a team in charge of RefApp 3.x E2E tests. However, as every developer at OpenMRS is preoccupied with their day-to-day development tasks, forming a new team with existing developers was a difficult task. Working on 3.x E2E tests, on the other hand, does not necessitate a thorough understanding of the OpenMRS code base. Therefore, I went with plan B, which was to form a new team with new contributors.
The team was made up of five coding ninjas from the Sustainable Education Foundation (SEF); Pasindu, Piumal, Heshan, Kumuditha and Anjula (Mark my words: these guys will one day lead the world). Pasindu, Kumuditha and Anjula were brand new to the community while Heshan and Piumal had some experience with OpenMRS because they did GSoC with OpenMRS this year.
I ran an onboarding session to get them acquainted with OpenMRS, the QA team, the OpenMRS test framework, Cypress, Cucumber, and everything else. To keep them engaged, I created a backlog and began a two-week sprint. We presented our sprint plan to the QA team after planning the sprint, and they were very impressed.
The following two weeks were enjoyable. My time was mostly spent responding to team members’ questions, reviewing PRs, requesting changes, having conversations, merging PRs, and much more. I had a wonderful time with the team because they were so engaging.
Everything went swimmingly. We were able to complete the sprint in the time frame that we had set. Here’s a synopsis of the sprint:
On the 19th, we presented a sprint review to the QA team. Everyone gave an update and presented their work. It’s great to see how they’re making progress with OpenMRS. We also received some complimentary remarks.
Here’s the talk thread of the sprint:
Considering our performance, our team was invited for a call with Grace Potma, the product manager at OpenMRS and Jonathan Dick, asst. professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, who leads the Microfrontend Squad of OpenMRS. We got to know each other and had a discussion on future developments. The cover image of this blog is a screenshot taken on that call.
Next week I’ll post about how I was featured in an OpenMRS Global Good Progress Report.
