Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Quality opportunities for the Vivid Cycle

I thought I would add a little festivity to the holiday season, quality style. In case your holidays just are not the same without a little quality in your life, allow me to share how you can get involved.

There are opportunities for every role listed on the QA wiki. Testers and test writers are both needed. Testing and writing manual tests can be learned by anyone, no coding required. That said if you have skills or interest in technical work, I would encourage you help out. You will learn by doing and get help from others while you do it.

Now onto the good stuff! What can you do to help ubuntu this cycle from a quality perspective?

Dogfooding
There is an ever present need for brave folks willing to simply run the development version of ubuntu and use it as a daily machine throughout the cycle. It's one of the best ways for us as a community to uncover bugs and issues, in particular things that regress from the previous release. Upgrade to vivid today and see what you can break!

QATracker
This tool is written in drupal7 and runs the iso.qa.ubuntu.com and packages.qa.ubuntu.com sites. These sites are used to record and view the results of all of our manual testing efforts. Currently dkessel is leading the effort on implementing some needed UI changes. The code and more information about the project can be found on launchpad. The tracker is one of our primary tools and needs your help to become friendly for everyone to use.

In addition a charm would be useful to simplify setting up a development environment. The charm can be based upon the existing drupal charm. At the moment this work is ready for someone to jump in.

Unity8
Running unity8 as a full-time desktop is a personal goal I have for this cycle. I hope some others might also want to be early adopters and join me in this goal. For now you can help by testing the unity8 desktop. Have a look at running unity in lxc for an easy way to run unity8 today on your machine. Use it, test it, and offer feedback. I'll be talking more about unity8 as the cycle progresses and opportunities to test new features aimed at the desktop appear.

Core Apps
The core apps project is an excellent way to get involved. These applications have been lovingly developed by community members just like you. Many of the teams are looking for help in writing tests and for someone who can help bring a testing mindset and eye to the work. As of this writing specifically the docviewer, terminal and calculator teams would love your help. The core apps hackdays are happening this week, drop by and introduce yourself to get started!

Manual Tests
Like the sound of writing tests but the idea of writing code turns you off? Manual tests are needed as well! They are written in English and are easy to understand and write. Manual tests include everything you see on the qatracker and are managed as a launchpad project. This means you can pick a bug and "fix it" by submitting a merge request. The bugs involve both fixing existing tests as well as requests for new testcases.

Images
As always there are images that need testing. Testing milestones occur later in the cycle which involve everyone helping to test a specific set of images. In the meantime, daily images are generated that have made it through the automated tests and are ready for manual testing. Booting an image in a live session is a great way to check for regressions on your machine. Doing this early in the cycle can help make sure your hardware and others like it experience a regression free upgrade when the time comes.

Triaging
After subjecting software to testing, bugs are naturally found. These bugs then need to be verified and triaged. The bugsquadders, as they are called, would be happy to help you learn to categorize or triage bugs and do other tasks.

No matter how you choose to get involved, feel free to contact me for help if needed. Most of all, Happy Testing!


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