Quality mid-cycle checkup

About 2.5 months ago I wrote about the plans for the ubuntu QA community for the quantal cycle. We were building off of lots of buzz from the precise release and we planned to undertake lots of new work, while being very careful to avoid burnout. Our focus was to take QA to the next level and help us communicate and grow as a team to take on the opportunities we have.

So, how are we doing? Let's go over each of the points noted in the original post and talk about the progress and plans.

ISOTesting
Our alpha1 testing went very well, but the alpha2 and alpha3 have seen less participation. In addition we were asked and responded to a plan to test our iso's every 2 weeks as part of a more cadenced testing. Overall, isotesting continues to be a weak spot for us as a community. ISO Testing is perhaps the most important piece of testing for us as a greater ubuntu community. The image we produce is literally the first experience many folks have with ubuntu. If it fails to install, well, there went our chance for a positive first impression :-( I would be happy to hear ideas or comments on isotesting in particular.

Application Testing
This work has been mostly completed. The package tracker now allows us to perform work that was done via checkbox or manual testing last cycle. We can now manage results, tests and reporting all in one tool -- and it's all publicly available. For more information about the qatracker, see this wiki page.

SRU Verification
This work is still on paper, awaiting for the 12.04.1 release before further discussions and work will begin.

General Testing (eg, Day to Day running of the development version)
I am still experimenting with understanding how to enable better reporting and more focused testing on this. The current plan is to track specific packages that are critical to the desktop, and allow those run the development version the ability to report how the application is working for each specific upload during the development release. This is done with the qatracker. I'll blog more about this and the results in a later post. Contact me as always if your interested in helping.

Calls for Testing
This has been a wonderful success. There have been several calls for testing and the response has been wonderful. A big thank you to all of you who have helped test this. We've had over 50 people invovled in testing, and 41 bugs reported. Myself and the development teams thank you! But we're not done yet, unity testing among other things are still coming!

QATracker development
There is still room for more developers on the qatracker project. It's written in drupal, and I would happy to help you get started. As we grow, there will continue to be a need for people who want to build awesome tools to help us as a community test. If you have ideas for a tool (or know of a tool) that would help us test, please feel free to share with me.

Hardware Database
Work has been completed to spec out the design, and is scheduled now to land this cycle not in a future cycle. Fingers crossed we'll sneak this in before we release quantal :-) I'm very excitied to share this new tool with you; as soon as it's complete we'll be able to incorporate it into our workflow on the qatracker.

Testcases
Done, and for the most part our testcases have been migrated over. In addition, there is now a special team of folks who help to manage and maintain our testcases. If you have a passion for this work, contact me and I can help get you involved with the team.

Overall, I am happy to see signs of growth and newcomers to the community. If your on the fence about getting more involved with ubuntu, I would encourage you to check out QA. We collaborate with almost every area of ubuntu in some way, and no two days are the same :-) Send an email to the ubuntu-qa mailing list and introduce yourself.

So what's your opinion? Feel free to respond here with your thoughts and/or fill out the quality survey to give feedback.