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In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA</ref>. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join</ref>.
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA</ref>. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join</ref>.
We apologize for the lack of a QA section for the last few issues of FWN: the QA team was very busy with Fedora 16 validation testing. This issue catches up with the QA team news from the last several weeks.


Contributing Writer: [[User:Adamwill|Adam Williamson]]
Contributing Writer: [[User:Adamwill|Adam Williamson]]
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=== Test Days ===
=== Test Days ===


Last week saw Graphics Test Week, with NVIDIA Test Day on Tuesday 2010-04-13<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2010-04-13_Nouveau</ref>, ATI/AMD Test Day on Wednesday 2010-04-14<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2010-04-14_Radeon</ref>, and Intel graphics Test Day on Thursday 2010-04-15<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2010-04-15_Intel</ref>. We had a great turnout again, with 164 total adapters tested by slightly fewer testers (extra thanks to those diligent souls who tested multiple systems!) and great support from the Fedora X.org developers and triagers. [[User:Adamwill|Adam Williamson]] provided a recap<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090271.html</ref> of the week, with some statistics on the numbers of bugs filed, and on the numbers of bugs from previous graphics Test Days that were fixed.
In the past few weeks, we finished up the Fedora 16 Test Day schedule, with Graphics Test Week taking place at the start of September<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-06_Nouveau</ref> ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-07_Radeon</ref> ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-07_Radeon</ref>, virtualization test day taking place on 2011-09-15<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-15_Virtualization</ref>, another i18n desktop test day on 2011-09-22<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-22_I18n_Desktop</ref>, an ABRT test day on 2011-09-26<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-26_ABRT</ref>, a power management test day on 2011-09-29<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-29_PowerManagement</ref>, printing test day on 2011-10-06<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-10-06_Printing</ref>, Fedora packager plugin for Eclipse test day on 2011-10-13<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-10-13_Fedora_Packager_for_Eclipse</ref>, and Cloud SIG test day on 2011-10-20<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-10-20_Cloud_SIG_Test_Day</ref>. Most of these test days passed off successfully with the work of the developers behind them, despite the QA team being very busy, so many thanks to those who organized and carried out these events, and those who turned up to do the testing.
 
The Fedora 17 Test Day cycle has not yet started. We welcome proposals for test days for the Fedora 17 cycle, and we usually accept all the proposals that are made. You can propose a test day for almost anything, and organize it yourself following the handy guide we provide<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/SOP_Test_Day_management</ref>, or alternatively we can help out with the organization of the event. Information on how to propose a test day is available on the Wiki<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days/Create</ref>.
 
<references/>


This week's Test Day<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2010-04-22_StorageFiltering</ref> will be on Anaconda (the Fedora installer)'s storage support<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Features/StorageFiltering</ref>: we will aim to test all the various exotic storage device options Anaconda makes available, including various types of RAID array, iSCSI (with iBFT), FCoE (if we can find someone with the hardware - please do come along if you have it!) and multipath devices. The broader the base of devices we can test the better, so please do come along and help if you can, particularly if you have, say, a motherboard that supports BIOS RAID and a couple of hard disks you can use temporarily. Unlike normal Test Days, it's impractical to do this testing with a live image, but there is some testing that can be done in a virtual machine. The Test Day will take place all day on Thursday 2010-04-22 in the #fedora-test-day channel on Freenode IRC (if you're not sure how to use IRC, there's an instruction page<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_IRC</ref>, or you can use WebIRC<ref>http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=fedora-test-day</ref>). If you can't make it on the day, you can still provide your results on the Wiki page before or after the event.
=== Fedora 16 preparation ===


If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac<ref>http://fedorahosted.org/fedora-qa/</ref>.
As mentioned above, Fedora 16 release validation took up almost all of the QA team's time during the last few months, with very challenging Beta and Final releases. There were a total of 12 candidate builds for Beta and Final combined, and the whole team put in tireless work running the set of validation tests against each build and then investigating and verifying the large number of blocker bugs identified. The team was able to contribute to the release eventually going ahead with only a one week slip to the Beta schedule and no slip of the Final schedule, a considerable achievement in the light of the many complex changes in the Fedora 16 feature list.


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=== Update acceptance testing ===
=== Release criteria updates ===
 
Largely as a result of the Fedora 16 validation process, there were several adjustments and additions to the release criteria in recent weeks. After discussion of the proposed kickstart / unattended installation release criterion concluded, [[User:Adamwill|Adam Williamson]] reported that he had committed his proposed modifications<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102599.html</ref>. He also committed a change to reflect the increased priority of EFI installations from Fedora 17 onwards<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102600.html</ref>.
 
Adam also passed on a suggestion from [[User:Pjones|Peter Jones]] to improve the clarity of the virtualization criteria<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102601.html</ref>. After an extensive discussion, an elegant wording suggestion from Albert Graham<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102636.html</ref> was eventually accepted and committed<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103680.html</ref>.
 
[[User:Tflink|Tim Flink]] raised the question to what extent support for Xen virtualization should be included in the release criteria<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/103127.html</ref>. After a similarly enthusiastic discussion, it was eventually agreed that Xen DomU support - effectively, the ability to install successfully as a Xen guest - should be a Final release criterion<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103678.html</ref>.


[[User:Adamwill|Adam Williamson]] and [[User:Jlaska|James Laska]] got together with Bodhi developers [[User:Lmacken|Luke Macken]] and [[User:Bochecha|Mathieu Bridon]] to find out about their plans for implementing different feedback types in Bodhi, following the proposals by Doug Ledford<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-March/131799.html</ref> and Adam<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-March/089690.html</ref>. Luke and Mathieu indicated that this work was occurring in the tg2 (TurboGears 2) branch of Bodhi, which they plan to put into production in the Fedora 14 timeframe. [[User:maxamillion|Adam Miller]] continued to revise the draft Proven Testers policy<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/JoinProvenTesters:Draft</ref> based on the group's feedback.
Adam also proposed downgrading some rarely-used kickstart deployment methods from Beta to Final in the criteria, requiring only the most commonly-used to be working at Beta stage<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103557.html</ref>.
 
Finally, Adam proposed a criterion for i18n (translation) issues<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103588.html</ref>. After discussion, the proposal was agreed upon at a blocker review meeting later in the week<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103679.html</ref>.


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=== Kernel triage ===
=== Update policy changes ===
 
In September, [[User:Karsten|Karsten Hopp]] raised the issue of a security update for Fedora 14 which had been languishing in the updates-testing repository for some time<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102493.html</ref>. [[User:Adamwill|Adam Williamson]] explained that the amount of testers working on older releases was limited, and that the actual karma requirements for updates to be accepted were controlled by FESCo (the Fedora engineering steering committee), not the QA group<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102497.html</ref>. [[User:Cra|Chuck Anderson]] noted that he had the update in question installed, but was struggling for lack of information on how to test it properly<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102503.html</ref>. [[User:Sundaram|Rahul Sundaram]] suggested that Karsten file a ticket with FESCo to raise the issue<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102502.html</ref>, and Karsten did<ref>http://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/664</ref>.
 
That ticket was merged with another similar one reported by Doug Ledford<ref>http://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/667</ref>, which became a topic of concern to FESCo. After several rounds of discussions, FESCo first decided to relax the requirements for critical path updates somewhat by allowing them to be sent through to the stable repository without the 'required' karma after a period of two weeks had elapsed<ref>http://fedorahosted.org/bodhi/ticket/642</ref>, and later proposed removing the requirement for critical path updates to receive positive karma from a proven tester<ref>http://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/667#comment:26</ref>, effectively a proposal to end the proven tester system, as this is the only function it serves.


At the weekly Bugzappers meeting<ref>http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2010-04-13/fedora-meeting.2010-04-13-15.01.log.html</ref>, [[User:Kevin|Kevin Fenzi]] reported that he had begun to investigate kernel triage, an area [[User:Rjune|Richard June]] had previously been looking into but had been lacking free time. Kevin had begun to contact kernel team members and consider an overall strategy for approaching kernel triage, and asked other interested group members to join him.
The QA group discussed this proposal at the weekly meeting of 2011-11-07<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings/20111107</ref>, agreeing that, while they had some reservations about the proposal, they were not definitely opposed to it, and recognized that critical path updates not receiving the currently-required karma is a significant problem.


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<references/>


=== Fedora 13 Beta Delta ISOs ===
=== Update candidate notification ===


Andre Robatino announced<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090082.html</ref> the availability of Delta ISOs for Fedora 13 Beta. As a quick reminder, Delta ISOs include just the difference between two ISO images, allowing you to reconstruct one image from the other and the Delta ISO, making it much faster to download a new ISO if you have a similar previous ISO. Andre provided deltas from Fedora 12 to 13 Beta (around 40% of the size of the full F13 Beta images), and from 13 Alpha to 13 Beta (around 10% of the size of the full images).
Samuel Greenfeld asked if there was any system to notify testers of new candidate updates for specific packages, and to determine what packages are being actively used on a system<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102981.html</ref>. There were no takers for the second question, but for the first, [[User:Adamwill|Adam Williamson]] suggested using yum parameters that would allow one to specify only certain packages be pulled from the updates-testing repository<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102982.html</ref>, and [[User:till|Till Maas]] pointed out that Bodhi can actually provide per-package RSS notifications<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102992.html</ref>.


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=== Fedora 13 testing ===
=== Proven tester meetings ===


Planned Fedora 13 testing was much quieter this week with the successful release of the Beta, but we did see the first final blocker review meeting<ref>http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-bugzappers/2010-04-16/f-13-blocker-bug-review.2010-04-16-15.12.log.html</ref>, which was expertly summarized<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090224.html</ref> by [[User:Jlaska|James Laska]]. All outstanding blocker bugs for Fedora 13 were reviewed and assigned for action by testers or the development team.  
As a response to the concerns about candidate updates not receiving enough karma, [[User:Kevin|Kevin Fenzi]] ran a series of weekly proven tester meetups<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/102869.html</ref> from 2011-09-21 to 2011-10-26. Recaps of these meetings are available in the mailing list archives<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/103000.html</ref> <ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103341.html</ref> <ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103585.html</ref> <ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103840.html</ref> <ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/104043.html</ref>.


Several group members were engaged in testing the final Beta release. [[TomHorsley|Tom Horsley]] reported<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090186.html</ref> a README file was present on the DVD image which discussed the boot.iso image, which is no longer included in the DVD. [[User:Sundaram|Rahul Sundaram]] suggested<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090202.html</ref> he file a bug report. Tom also noticed<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090198.html</ref> a large amount of debugging messages from GDM in his system logs; Al Dunsmuir also observed this<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090239.html</ref>. [[User:Adamwill|Adam Williamson]] thought<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090254.html</ref> this was due to debugging statements that were temporarily enabled in plymouth to track down a bug, but [[User:rstrode|Ray Strode]] later mentioned in IRC conversation that it was simply because the current gdm package is a development release. Tom wasn't done yet; he also reported<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090199.html</ref> results from testing three ATI video cards, complete with bug reports.
Kevin also proposed an updates-testing-info mailing list, containing only the mails about new packages in updates-testing<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-September/103163.html</ref>. However, the consensus was against the idea, as it was felt that it was easy enough to simply filter the desired mails from the test mailing list for those who did not want to read the other traffic.
 
<references/>


Wolfgang Rupprecht reported<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090097.html</ref> that upgrading to Fedora 13 Beta using preupgrade had failed for him; Birger also had problems<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090215.html</ref> despite definitely having a large enough /boot partition. [[User:Kparal|Kamil Paral]] suggested<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090222.html</ref> waiting for preupgrade 1.1.5 and trying again, as it has fixes for several significant bugs.
=== QA group representation at FUDCon Pune ===


Tommy He tried out the new backup tool Deja Dup and found it lacking<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090156.html</ref>: it could not restore a backup it had created. [[User:Sundaram|Rahul Sundaram]] swung into action and made sure the upstream authors were aware of the bug, reporting back<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2010-April/090168.html</ref> that they would look into it over the coming weekend.
[[User:Ankursinha|Ankur Sinha]] asked whether anyone from the QA team would be present at the upcoming FUDCon in Pune, India and able to do a presentation on the group's activities<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103712.html</ref>. [[User:Adamwill|Adam Williamson]] replied that unfortunately none of the Red Hat team would be at the conference, but encouraged Ankur to take a shot at giving a presentation himself<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103728.html</ref>. A S Alam then stepped up to volunteer to lead a QA session<ref>http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-October/103739.html</ref>. His session was scheduled for 2011-11-04<ref>http://fudcon.in/sessions/fedora-testing</ref>, but we have no report on the event - if you were present, please write to the mailing list and let us know how it went!


<references/>
<references/>

Latest revision as of 05:10, 17 November 2011

QualityAssurance

In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1]. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page[2].

We apologize for the lack of a QA section for the last few issues of FWN: the QA team was very busy with Fedora 16 validation testing. This issue catches up with the QA team news from the last several weeks.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

In the past few weeks, we finished up the Fedora 16 Test Day schedule, with Graphics Test Week taking place at the start of September[1] ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-07_Radeon</ref> ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-09-07_Radeon</ref>, virtualization test day taking place on 2011-09-15[2], another i18n desktop test day on 2011-09-22[3], an ABRT test day on 2011-09-26[4], a power management test day on 2011-09-29[5], printing test day on 2011-10-06[6], Fedora packager plugin for Eclipse test day on 2011-10-13[7], and Cloud SIG test day on 2011-10-20[8]. Most of these test days passed off successfully with the work of the developers behind them, despite the QA team being very busy, so many thanks to those who organized and carried out these events, and those who turned up to do the testing.

The Fedora 17 Test Day cycle has not yet started. We welcome proposals for test days for the Fedora 17 cycle, and we usually accept all the proposals that are made. You can propose a test day for almost anything, and organize it yourself following the handy guide we provide[9], or alternatively we can help out with the organization of the event. Information on how to propose a test day is available on the Wiki[10].

Fedora 16 preparation

As mentioned above, Fedora 16 release validation took up almost all of the QA team's time during the last few months, with very challenging Beta and Final releases. There were a total of 12 candidate builds for Beta and Final combined, and the whole team put in tireless work running the set of validation tests against each build and then investigating and verifying the large number of blocker bugs identified. The team was able to contribute to the release eventually going ahead with only a one week slip to the Beta schedule and no slip of the Final schedule, a considerable achievement in the light of the many complex changes in the Fedora 16 feature list.


Release criteria updates

Largely as a result of the Fedora 16 validation process, there were several adjustments and additions to the release criteria in recent weeks. After discussion of the proposed kickstart / unattended installation release criterion concluded, Adam Williamson reported that he had committed his proposed modifications[1]. He also committed a change to reflect the increased priority of EFI installations from Fedora 17 onwards[2].

Adam also passed on a suggestion from Peter Jones to improve the clarity of the virtualization criteria[3]. After an extensive discussion, an elegant wording suggestion from Albert Graham[4] was eventually accepted and committed[5].

Tim Flink raised the question to what extent support for Xen virtualization should be included in the release criteria[6]. After a similarly enthusiastic discussion, it was eventually agreed that Xen DomU support - effectively, the ability to install successfully as a Xen guest - should be a Final release criterion[7].

Adam also proposed downgrading some rarely-used kickstart deployment methods from Beta to Final in the criteria, requiring only the most commonly-used to be working at Beta stage[8].

Finally, Adam proposed a criterion for i18n (translation) issues[9]. After discussion, the proposal was agreed upon at a blocker review meeting later in the week[10].

Update policy changes

In September, Karsten Hopp raised the issue of a security update for Fedora 14 which had been languishing in the updates-testing repository for some time[1]. Adam Williamson explained that the amount of testers working on older releases was limited, and that the actual karma requirements for updates to be accepted were controlled by FESCo (the Fedora engineering steering committee), not the QA group[2]. Chuck Anderson noted that he had the update in question installed, but was struggling for lack of information on how to test it properly[3]. Rahul Sundaram suggested that Karsten file a ticket with FESCo to raise the issue[4], and Karsten did[5].

That ticket was merged with another similar one reported by Doug Ledford[6], which became a topic of concern to FESCo. After several rounds of discussions, FESCo first decided to relax the requirements for critical path updates somewhat by allowing them to be sent through to the stable repository without the 'required' karma after a period of two weeks had elapsed[7], and later proposed removing the requirement for critical path updates to receive positive karma from a proven tester[8], effectively a proposal to end the proven tester system, as this is the only function it serves.

The QA group discussed this proposal at the weekly meeting of 2011-11-07[9], agreeing that, while they had some reservations about the proposal, they were not definitely opposed to it, and recognized that critical path updates not receiving the currently-required karma is a significant problem.

Update candidate notification

Samuel Greenfeld asked if there was any system to notify testers of new candidate updates for specific packages, and to determine what packages are being actively used on a system[1]. There were no takers for the second question, but for the first, Adam Williamson suggested using yum parameters that would allow one to specify only certain packages be pulled from the updates-testing repository[2], and Till Maas pointed out that Bodhi can actually provide per-package RSS notifications[3].

Proven tester meetings

As a response to the concerns about candidate updates not receiving enough karma, Kevin Fenzi ran a series of weekly proven tester meetups[1] from 2011-09-21 to 2011-10-26. Recaps of these meetings are available in the mailing list archives[2] [3] [4] [5] [6].

Kevin also proposed an updates-testing-info mailing list, containing only the mails about new packages in updates-testing[7]. However, the consensus was against the idea, as it was felt that it was easy enough to simply filter the desired mails from the test mailing list for those who did not want to read the other traffic.

QA group representation at FUDCon Pune

Ankur Sinha asked whether anyone from the QA team would be present at the upcoming FUDCon in Pune, India and able to do a presentation on the group's activities[1]. Adam Williamson replied that unfortunately none of the Red Hat team would be at the conference, but encouraged Ankur to take a shot at giving a presentation himself[2]. A S Alam then stepped up to volunteer to lead a QA session[3]. His session was scheduled for 2011-11-04[4], but we have no report on the event - if you were present, please write to the mailing list and let us know how it went!