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 Sugar on a Stickthe Fedora-derived USB stick distribution which features the Sugar desktop environment that is the default desktop for the OLPC project. Not too many people showed up to test, but we did get a solid set of results, and this was the first test day to experiment with a new result reporting system based on the Semantic MediaWiki plugin.
This coming week is special from a Test Day perspective: it's Video Test Week! There will be not one but three main track Test Days, one for each of the major video adapter manufacturers. Wednesday 2009-09-09 is ATI/AMD Radeon Test Day[2]. Thursday 2009-09-10 is NVIDIA Test Day[3]. And last but not least, Friday 2009-09-11 is Intel graphics Test Day[4]. As always, graphics drivers are one of the most vital parts of the Fedora experience, and the three main drivers have received their usual round of significant changes since the last release, so we encourage everyone to come out on the appropriate Test Day for their hardware and help test. There will be live images available, so you don't need Rawhide - or even Fedora - installed to test: you just need to show up, download a live image, run some simple tests to see how well the graphics work, and report your results. This will help us immensely to make sure Fedora 12 has good support for as much graphics hardware as possible, so please do come along! Each Test Day will run all day and be held in Freenode IRC #fedora-test-day. If you're not sure how to use IRC, see this page[5].
Next week's Fit and Finish[6] project Test Day[7] will be on sharing - sharing files, printers, music, and even remote desktop functionality. This area is critical to many users but often overlooked, so please come along to help refine it! The Test Day will be held on Tuesday 2009-09-08 in Freenode IRC #fedora-test-day.
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[8].
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-03_SoaS
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-09_Radeon
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-10_Nouveau
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-11_Intel
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_IRC
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fit_and_Finish
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-08_Fit_and_Finish:Sharing
- ↑ http://fedorahosted.org/fedora-qa/
Weekly meetings
The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-08-31. The full log is available[2]. David Pravec reported that he had created the test-announce mailing list[3] for important QA and BugZappers event announcements.
James Laska reported that he had not yet been able to talk to Liam Li about refining the install test plan to be more achievable within the timeframe for each snapshot release. He had improved the Dracut Test Day test cases. He had also spoken to Mike McGrath about the impact of nightly Rawhide images on the resources of alt.fedoraproject.org. Mike had not yet seen or had reported any major problems, but would like to be kept in the loop when new milestones are released. Adam Williamson asked if Infrastructure had any numbers for downloads of the nightly images. James did not know, but would ask.
Jesse Keating reported that he had built the new version of autotest for the AutoQA project to test. James Laska and Will Woods were in progress on testing it, and would report next week.
Will Woods reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. They had spent the week writing documentation, collected in the AutoQA category on the Wiki[4]. There are pages on how to write hooks and tests for AutoQA, and also pages on how AutoQA and autotest work. Will emphasized that no particular knowledge of how AutoQA itself works is required to write tests and hooks that can be used with it, and it's best to write tests and hooks before worrying about wrapper code to use them in AutoQA. In the coming week, they were planning to work on a method to get data back out of autotest to be used for projects like the israwhidebroken.com site.
James Laska did a Test Day update. He thanked those who had participated in the Dracut Test Day[5], and promised to send a summary to the mailing list soon. He noted that a sectool Test Day[6] was due the day after the meeting. Adam Williamson suggested some potential improvements to the Wiki page, and James asked him to send them to the mailing list so the Test Day organizer, Eduard Beneš, could update the page. The Sugar on a Stick Test Day was due the Thursday after the meeting, and noted that he and Sebastian Dziallas were working on getting the page ready, using the new Semantic system for reporting results. Finally, Adam Williamson noted that Graphics Test Week was coming the following week, and he was working on getting the pages created. He expected to be able to re-use many test cases from the Fedora 11 Test Days.
Kamil Paral brought up the idea of using zsync[7] to reduce the download weight of nightly Rawhide live images. Jesse Keating and Adam Williamson did not think it would result in much benefit, due to the way Fedora live CDs are implemented (as a single large filesystem image, rather than a set of package files). Will Woods suggested doing some tests to be sure, and Kamil said he would do this.
The group discussed the status of the proposed lower process capabilities feature for Fedora 12[8]. There was general concern that development of this feature was not sufficiently advanced for the current stage of Fedora 12 development. Fenris02 agreed to talk to the feature maintainer to see what could be done to avoid dropping the feature entirely for Fedora 12.
The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[9] was held on 2009-09-01. The full log is available[10]. Adam Williamson noted that some planned topics could not be discussed, as important people were not present: Brennan Ashton was not available to update on the triage metrics project, and Richard June was not present to update on the kernel triage project.
The group discussed the new test-announce mailing list[11]. Matej Cepl suggested that it be added to Gmane[12]. Adam Williamson promised to do this.
Adam Williamson brought up the topic of Triage Days, which Edward Kirk had put on the agenda with a view to presenting some ideas on improving them. However, Edward was not at the meeting. No-one else had significant ideas on the topic.
The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-09-07 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-09-08 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Meetings/20090831
- ↑ http://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test-announce
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:AutoQA
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-08-27_Dracut
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-09-01_Sectool
- ↑ http://zsync.moria.org.uk/
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/LowerProcessCapabilities
- ↑ http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Meetings
- ↑ http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2009-09-01/fedora-meeting.2009-09-01-15.01.log.html
- ↑ http://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test-announce
- ↑ http://www.gmane.org/
Zsync feasibility
As discussed at the meeting, Kamil Paral tested[1] the practicality of using zsync[2] to reduce the size of nightly Rawhide live image downloads. He found that savings of between 30% and 60% were possible when testing the deltas between various nightly images.
Installation testing SOP update
Liam Li announced[1] that he had updated the installation testing SOP draft[2], with improved instructions on summarizing test results.
Test Day summaries
Test Day summaries for Dracut[1] and Sectool[2] were provided by James Laska and Eduard Beneš respectively.
Mediawiki Semantic plugin testing
Mel Chua announced[1] that he had built a working Mediawiki test instance with the Semantic extension[2] installed, for the purpose of implementing an improved test result reporting system. He linked to a meeting log[3] which documented the implementation. He noted that the upstream project were interested in having Fedora's use of the Semantic system documented, and asked if anyone would be willing to work on this.