QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1].
Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson
Test Days
This week's Test Day[1] was on virtualization[2], particularly the virtualization technologies most associated with Fedora - KVM, qemu, libvirt and virt-manager. We had a great turnout of developers and testers and managed to cover a lot of ground, and over 25 new bugs were discovered and reported.
Next week's Test Day[3] will be on iBus[4], the new default input framework for Asian languages for Fedora 11. If you use Fedora in one of these languages - for instance, Chinese, Japanese or Korean - you'll want to come out to this test day, as this is a significant change and we need to make sure it's working in all situations, and fix any bugs if it's not. The Test Day will be held on 2009-05-14 (Thursday) in IRC #fedora-qa.
Weekly meetings
The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-05-06. The full log is available[2]. James Laska reported solid progress in transferring future tasks for the autoqa project into trac.
Will Woods reported on several Fedora 10 to Fedora 11 upgrade bugs he has been tracking, and noted that he needs to write some more upgrade test cases to cover areas where bugs are consistently being found.
James Laska reported that he had not had time to work with David Zeuthen and Lennart Poettering on false positives in the hard disk failure detection system, but Will Woods noted that relevant bugs had been filed by others[3] and the issue is definitely on the active radar for the developers.
Will Woods, James Laska and Adam Williamson reported steady progress on reviewing blocker bugs for SELinux, anaconda and X.org for Fedora 11 respectively, and the discussion then turned into a debate about the process for resolving Rawhide bugs in Bugzilla. The group agreed that the maintainer should be allowed to choose whether to close a bug immediately after checking in a fix for the reported issue, or whether to set the status to MODIFIED and wait for confirmation from the reporter that the bug is truly fixed before closing.
Jesse Keating reported on progress in the autoqa project. He has been working on a conflict finder test, and the autoqa team has been discussing directions for future development.
Adam Williamson reported on the volume control application debate. His package of the old gnome-volume-control under the name gst-mixer has been accepted into the Fedora 11 repositories and added to the default package groups so that it will be installed by default in the DVD package selection and on the desktop spin for Fedora 11 release. The 'pavucontrol' mixer for PulseAudio has been removed, so Fedora 11's desktop spin and default DVD installation package set will include two graphical mixers, the new gnome-volume-control and gst-mixer. These between them cover all major use cases.
Jóhann Guðmundsson raised the issue of Jesse Keating's proposal to drop the Alpha release for the Fedora 12 cycle. James Laska worried that it might cause trouble for Fedora 12 Test Days. Jóhann pointed out that live CDs are now habitually generated for each Test Day, but James worried about what would happen if it proved impossible to generate a live CD for a week. Jesse explained that as far as he saw it, the main value of Alpha was to be a known-good point to bootstrap a Rawhide installation, and it often fails at that. He suggested that for Fedora 12, Fedora 11 release could serve as the known-good point to bootstrap a Rawhide installation.
The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[4] was held on 2009-05-05. The full log is available[5]. Adam Williamson reported on progress with the triage metrics project: members of the Fedora Python development group had volunteered and helped port the code to Python 2.4 (as is required before it can run on Infrastructure's servers), but wanted some test data to confirm that their fixes are valid. Adam will try to ensure Brennan provides the necessary test data, and then the application can likely go live.
Adam also reported on the status of the Bugzilla priority/severity proposal. The group agreed that his final draft of the proposed email to the development group was good. Adam suggested that it would be a good idea for another group member to actually send the proposal, and Matej Cepl volunteered to do it.
Edward Kirk reported on the progress of the SOP to cover accepting new members into the Bugzappers group. The group decided to put the SOP into place on the Wiki and work on any further changes 'live'. Edward agreed to take care of publishing the SOP with appropriate links.
The group then voted unanimously to adjourn the meeting and go eat cookies.
The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-05-13 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-05-12 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.
Fedora bug workflow
Adam Williamson announced[1] that he had extensively revised the Fedora bug workflow page[2] to more extensively cover all the available statuses and resolutions, and all the common processes through which most bug reports go. Niels Haase pointed out[3] that the NEXTRELEASE resolution, which Adam had described in the page as not used for Fedora, is actually used by the automated Bodhi scripts when resolving a bug for which an official update has been issued. Adam followed up this issue, and reported[4] that his discussions indicated his interpretation - that bugs fixed in stable releases should be closed as ERRATA - is likely correct, and the Bodhi scripts should be adjusted.
Bugzappers new member SOP
Edward Kirk reported[1] that he had put the new member SOP for the Bugzappers group live on the Wiki, as agreed at the weekly meeting. Christopher Beland suggested[2] that the language used was very formal, and some areas might be a little vague. Adam Williamson promised[3] to try and find time to revise the page a little.