Quality and the community in the Trusty Cycle

Since I last posted on the topic of our communities future, we've helped push out a new release of ubuntu. Saucy and fresh, the little salamander is now out in the wild. With the release out it's time to move forward with these changes.

(c) Carla Sella

The beginning of a new cycle is always a time to breathe for us in quality and these past few days of relative calm has indeed been a welcome respite from the craziness of testing leading up to a release.

We can rebuild it. We have the technology. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.

So, let's talk about some of the changes coming to quality for this new cycle.

Defined Roles
I want to help our new members become a productive part of ubuntu quality as soon as possible. To this end I've created a list of roles for the quality team. By defining roles within the team it is easy to see how you can contribute as a 'tester', 'test writer', or 'developer'.

Contribute anytime
While release milestones and calls for testing will still be important, contributing to ubuntu quality can be a daily task. There are activities you can perform any day and anytime in the cycle. The roles pages list activities for each role that can be done right now. If you are a tester, check out the activities you can do right now to help!

More exploratory testing
We're iterating faster and faster. Builds of new code are landing each day, and in some cases several times a day. We can't afford to only test every other week with cadence testing. Instead, we've ramped up efforts to automatically test on each of these new builds. But we still need manual testing!

As a tester you can provide testing results for images, packages and hardware at any time! In addition, exploratory testing is highly encouraged. This is were we as manual testers shine! I want to encourage ongoing exploratory testing all throughout the cycle. Run and use the development version of ubuntu on your machine all the time!

Tackling some big projects
One of the things I wanted to push us as a team towards was tackling some projects that have a wider impact than just us. To that end, you can see several big projects on the activities pages for each role.

For testers, we are undertaking making reporting issues better for users. For the test writers, one of the largest projects is spearheading the effort to make manual image testing less burdensome and more automated by automating ubiquity testing. And for developers, the autopilot emulators are big projects as well and need help.

More involvement with bugs
As a quality community with interact with many bugs. Sometimes we are finding the bug, other times we might confirm them or verify a fix works. However, we haven't always gone the extra step towards doing work with SRU verifications and bug triage. The bugsquad and others have traditionally performed these tasks. If you'll notice these activities are now encouraged for those in the tester role. Let's dive more into the bug world.

A potential expansion of the team
With the mention of the bugsquad and the encouraged involvement with bugs for our team, I would like to propose a union between the quality and bugsquad teams. I would encourage current bugsquad members to take up tester roles, and consider some of the additional opportunities that are available. For those who have been testing with the quality team in past cycles, let's get more invovled with bugs and traditional bugsquad activities as mentioned above.

Making a quality LTS
Trusty Tahr is going to be the next LTS release. Those of you who remember and use Precise will agree that it is going to be a tough act to follow. The bar is set high, but I am confident we can reach it and do better.

We can't do this alone. We need testers, test writers, and developers! If you are interested in helping us achieve our goal, please join us! Now is an excellent time to learn and grow with the rest of us on the team. Thanks for helping making ubuntu better!