FWN/Beats/QualityAssurance

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

There was no Test Day last week, as we finally released Fedora 11.

Currently, no Test Day is scheduled for next week - it is still very early in the Fedora 12 cycle. If you would like to propose a test day which could result in changes for post-release updates for Fedora 11, or an early test day for Fedora 12, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac.

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting was to be held on 2009-06-10, but was cancelled for the week due to many key group members being busy with the Fedora Development Cycle Activity Day. Next week's meeting will cover the ground.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-06-09. The full log is available. The group discussed revising the components and active triagers page, as is traditional at the start of a new release cycle. Adam Williamson suggested that, once the planned change to have the FAS 'triagers' group automatically grant membership of the 'fedorabugs' group, have new members apply to 'triagers' rather than 'fedorabugs', and ensure all current triagers are members of 'triagers' went through, the 'triagers' group membership list should become the canonical source of active triagers. The group agreed, but also decided to keep the Wiki page up to date. There was some discussion about whether changes directly from FAS, or from FAS via the triage metrics system, could be automatically fed into the Wiki page, but no decision was reached. In the end, Niels Haase volunteered to update the page by hand.

Edward Kirk proposed removing yum and anaconda from the list of components requiring triage, as their maintainers did not want help from the Bugzappers group. This prompted Adam Williamson to report that he had been working on engaging the kernel and anaconda teams in the Bugzappers process, at the request of James Laska. Andy Lindeberg, who currently works on triaging anaconda, is working on a Wiki page that will document the process used in Bugzilla by the anaconda team, and then Adam will try to work with her and the Bugzappers group to reconcile the process with the normal Bugzappers process.

Matej Cepl pointed out that the group had made a conscious decision at the start of the Fedora 11 cycle not to triage kernel bugs, as in the past it had taken a lot of time for little result. However, two group members - Brennan Ashton and Richard June - said they were interested in attempting some kernel triage, if a good process could be found. Adam Williamson promised to continue the discussion with the kernel maintainers and bring in Edward and Richard with a view to agreeing a workable process for kernel bug triage.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-06-17 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-06-16 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Fedora 11 DeltaISO availability

Andre Robatino announced that he had built and made available delta ISOs - files containing the difference between two ISO images, allowing the reconstruction of the latest final image - for Fedora 11 final release, from the Fedora 11 preview image. He also noted that he had built but could not publish ISOs for Fedora 10 to Fedora 11, and suggested that these could be provided as torrents on the official Fedora torrent tracker, but this has not yet been adopted.

Components and Triagers page revision

Niels Haase announced that he had revised the Components and Triagers page as agreed at the weekly Bugzappers meeting, to list only triagers known to be active. He recommended everyone check the diff for his changes, and make appropriate corrections if they had been incorrectly added to, removed from or kept on the list.

QA, Bugzappers and others involvement in release documentation

A post by Scott Robbins, suggesting a particular issue in Fedora 11 be noted on the download page, led to an extensive discussion of how those involved in the QA and BugZappers group, as well as those involved in front-line user support, could best document important issues at release time. Adam Williamson opposed documenting common problems on the download page as it would be hard to draw a line to prevent too extensive a list of problems complicating the page and discouraging people from downloading Fedora at all. In that post and others in the thread, Adam advocated trying to have all teams contribute known issues to a well-defined set of canonical pages, so that these pages would gain widespread use and acceptance among the community, particularly the Release Notes and Common Bugs pages. Adam also suggested that members of the QA, BugZappers and other teams with an interest in documenting significant issues with releases should join the Documentation project in order to improve the communication between these teams and the docs team, and hopefully ensure that future Release Notes cover all the material they would like to see covered.