If you suppose that Drupal growth is linear (it was always faster than that) and then crunch the numbers in webchick's Drupal 6 announcement then you will quickly see that we will need to deal with about 1200 contributors and 20000 patches for Drupal 7. If we want to keep up Drupal quality this needs automated testing. We are past the point where a few fanatics (catch, webernet and webchick, mostly) can click around to find obvious glitches. If we want to unit test core, we need about as many tests (if not more!) as there are functions: that means 2000 tests needs to be written. If we are to believe that the community will do it -- and there already traces of it happening, tests appearing in the issue queue for one particular bug that's being fixed -- then those who maintain patches will need to face an avalance of testing. To find out the logistics of this and to write necessary tools, we are arranging a three day sprint in Paris. Dries, Douglas Huber the Acquia Propellerhead, Rok Zlender (the simpletest maintainer), myself are definitely coming. However, Jimmy Berry, the simpletest co-maintainer, one of the most important simpletest contributors today needs the assistance of the community, please help boombatower go to Paris!

Just a small reminder of some of the results of previous sprints I have participated in: 2006, Vancouver saw a ton of 4.7 bugs closed and serious advancement in FAPI. 2007 April I was working together with Jeff Eaton and we create form API 3. 2008 February six of us were working on getting fields on core and then I worekd with Larry Garfield on the Database: The Next Generation and the Registry patches. This is a very nice tradition that shows: face-to-face work is always a lot more effective. Please help make it happen.

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