A Testathon is like a hackathon, but for testers. On the day, we had 100 app testers from Kenya testing amazing apps with with the aim of finding bugs in new releases in a competitive format and of course, to win a whole load of prizes. There was also a recruitment drive attached to these events, to get more talent from the local markets into the Facebook organisation. This event was led by GAT, on Facebook’s behalf, and the testers were bug hunting on new releases of Instagram, Messenger and the Facebook app itself.
This was an interesting build for me as the production requirements were very light (85″ display, light sound reinforcement using the in-house system and uplighting using the CORE Colourpoint Mk2 units), but there was the added challenge of operating in a new market and ensuring that we had a stable network connection that was properly load balanced. Each of the 100 app testers that attended, came with up to 15 different devices (desktop, mobile and tablets) that they were testing the apps on, meaning that we had to build a network that could house at least 1500 devices. Taking that into account, we built an infrastructure using a boosted line from Safaricom, Ruckus APs and 100 hardwired drops for the primary desktop device. We also created a backup network with bonded 4G units, in case of an outage.