Kick-starting quality for Ubuntu Touch

I wanted to write a post about the excitement of the new platform and the wonderful new challenges we face ahead of us. Now, given that this platform is being written right now from the ground up, those with a nose for quality instantly perk up. We love well tested applications, and developing with tests in mind from the start is much easier than attempting to retrofit. Seeing the first fruits of the developer effort is very exciting -- good work everyone!

So with that in mind, I started looking at some of the excellent work the core apps teams are doing with there applications. They've been working with the design community to turn the nice mockups into reality. I took the liberty of checking out and running some of the first versions of these applications. The calculator is one that stood out to me as already closing in on its specification. So armed with some of the design conversation for the calculator, I started a branch to create a set of manual tests for ubuntu touch applications, starting with the calculator. If you are interested in quality, now is the time to be involved! The applications can all be installed and run on your phone or even a ubuntu desktop.

So what can you do?

If you're a tester;

• Install the core apps from ppa:ubuntu-touch-coreapps-drivers/daily
• Run the applications, take a look at the designs, and start putting together some testcases
• Push your testcases up to the manual test repository
• As the applications mature in functionality, help test by participating in the calls for testing and cadence weeks for the platform.

If you're a developer and have questions on writing tests for your application, feel free to contact me. I would love to see not only nice unit test driven code, but also some end user tests via autopilot, and I want to make sure you as a developer have the resources to do so. In addition, we as a quality community are happy to help test with you and write some manual tests to do so for your application.

I'm helping!