QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team[1].
Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson
Test Days
Last week's main track Test Day[1] was on ABRT[2], the Automated Bug Reporting Tool. There was a solid turnout of testers and developers, and several bugs were filed and fixed.
Last weeks' Fit and Finish Test Day[3] was on printing. The Fit and Finish team and some volunteer testers filed several bugs which should improve the friendliness of printing and printing configuration, seven of which have already been fixed.
Next week's main track Test Day[4] will be on Dracut[5]. Dracut is a new initrd (or, more properly, initramfs) generation tool designed to replace mkinitrd and nash for Fedora 12. An initrd or initramfs is the basic pre-built filesystem image that is initialized along with the kernel when your system first boots up, allowing the necessary hardware to be initialized to access your real storage devices and thus permitting the main boot process to proceed, so obviously it is a critical component of any system; if there's a problem with Dracut, it could very well stop your system from being able to boot at all. So it's vital that we get as much testing as possible on as wide a variety of hardware as we can. We're particularly interested in testing on more complex setups, where the root partition is on a RAID or LVM array, or even LVM-on-RAID, or where the root partition is mounted across a network connection. There will be live CD images available for testing, so you can test without a Rawhide install too. Please come along and help out! The Test Day will be held on Thursday 2009-08-27 in IRC #fedora-test-day (note the change of IRC channel).
If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 12 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac[6].
- ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-08-20_ABRT
- ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ABRT
- ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-08-18_Fit_and_Finish:Printing
- ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-08-27
- ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dracut
- ↑ http://fedorahosted.org/fedora-qa/
Weekly meetings
The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-08-17. The full log is available[2]. James Laska reported that a first release candidate for the Fedora 12 Alpha had been uploaded to alt.fedoraproject.org, the installation test matrix[3] had been created, and that testing was needed to fill it out. Adam Williamson asked how the blocker list looked, and James reported that it contained only two bugs, both in MODIFIED state, and both appearing to have been fixed. On overall readiness, James and Jesse Keating reported that the installer seems to be in good shape, but the final round of testing would confirm that. Adam felt that X.org was in good shape, certainly good enough for an Alpha release. In general the group felt the current state was good enough for an Alpha release.
Will Woods reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. He had now implemented a system for all tests to report their results to the autoqa-results list[4] (sign up for this list if you want to see the results of the AutoQA tests!) He had updated the test writing notes[5] and fixed the test watcher script so that the tests run regularly, automatically, with no manual intervention needed. He was planning to write a draft of a 'How to write a test' document. He had also made a blog post[6] to summarize current progress. Kamil Paral pointed out that Petr Splichal is working on a package sanity test tool, and it might be a good idea to integrate his work into the AutoQA framework. David Pravec suggested inviting Petr to the next QA meeting to discuss the proposal, and Kamil contacted Petr to ask him to speak to Will.
James Laska gave an update on Test Day status. He had not seen a post-event report for the Fit and Finish team's Peripherals Test Day, but Adam Williamson noted he had run his test day report script on the Peripherals page and it showed 10 NEW, 2 ASSIGNED and one CLOSED bug report. He noted the Fit and Finish Printing Test Day and the main track ABRT Test Day were upcoming, and that David Pravec and Kamil Paral were running the ABRT event. James asked Jóhann Guðmundsson if he would like to lead the upcoming Dracut Test Day, but Jóhann did not respond, so James promised to find out who would be leading the event later.
The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[7] was held on 2009-08-18. The full log is available[8]. Niels Haase asked if the switchover in procedure for marking bugs as triaged could be added to the QA project calendar. Adam Williamson promised to check with James Laska whether this could be done.
Brennan Ashton gave an update on the status of the triage metrics project. He intends to redesign the entire codebase from scratch to make it easier to maintain in the long term, and have the new version online in one month. He had to take down the current implementation temporarily while the server it is hosted on was upgraded, and intended to leave it down until the new code was ready, but Adam Williamson asked him to re-enable the existing system once the host server had been upgraded, so there was still some system available. Brennan also stated he might have someone interested in becoming a co-maintainer of the project. Adam wanted to make sure that once the re-design was complete the system would be able to stay in place consistently over the long term, as long term reliable and consistent reporting is vital to the metrics project. Brennan assured him this would be the case.
The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-08-24 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-08-25 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings/20090817
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Fedora_12_Alpha_RC1_Install_Test_Results
- ↑ http://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/autoqa-results
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Talk:Autotest
- ↑ http://qa-rockstar.livejournal.com/8215.html
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings
- ↑ http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2009-08-18/fedora-meeting.2009-08-18-15.02.log.html
NetworkManager Test Day report
Adam Williamson reported[1] on the NetworkManager Test Day held on 2009-08-13, with a list of all bugs reported during the Test Day and their current statuses. He also provided the command he had used to generate the list, for the benefit of others doing future Test Day reports.
Alpha release candidates
Liam Li and James Laska announced the availability of, respectively, Fedora 12 Alpha RC1[1] and RC2[2], together with a plea for group members to test installation of these images and report their result to the test matrices: RC1[3], and RC2[4].
- ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-August/msg00521.html
- ↑ http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-August/msg00529.html
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Fedora_12_Alpha_RC1_Install_Test_Results
- ↑ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Fedora_12_Alpha_RC2_Install_Test_Results
DeltaISOs for Alpha test builds
Andre Robatino announced the availability of DeltaISOs for going from the Alpha Test Compose to Alpha RC1[1], and later for going from Alpha RC1 to Alpha RC2[2]. If you have downloaded the Test Compose or RC1 and would like to test RC2, please consider using these DeltaISOs to reduce the strain on the server.
Test Day live image creation guide updates
Kamil Paral announced[1] that he had updated the Test Day live image creation guide once more, with some refinements to the included applications and desktop icons.
Daily Rawhide live spins available
Adam Miller announced[1] that, with the help of Kevin Fenzi and others, a system was now in place to generate and make available daily Rawhide live images for several spins[2], so it will always be possible to test a bleeding-edge Rawhide system without installing anything to hard disk. Several list members posted heartfelt thanks for their efforts.