FWN/Beats/QualityAssurance

QualityAssurance

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Last week's Test Day was on Xfce, the popular alternative desktop. including PulseAudio. The always-loyal Xfce enthusiast base turned out to check on the polish of the Xfce desktop for Fedora 12, and filed many useful bug reports. Thanks to everyone who came out.

Next week's Test Day on 2009-10-01 will be on the installer's (Anaconda) storage system. As always, the Test Day will run all day in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel. The complete rewrite of Anaconda's storage code which first appeared in Fedora 11 continues to be refined, so please come out to the Test Day and help us ensure Anaconda is tested on a wide range of storage hardware and configurations.

No Fit and Finish track Test Day is planned for next week.

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.

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting was held on 2009-09-21. The full log is available. Adam Williamson noted that the zsync issues raised at the previous meeting had been discussed in a development mailing list thread, but no real movement had yet occurred.

Adam Williamson mentioned that the beta release process was getting underway, and the test compose would be happening on 2009-09-23. He also reminded the group that a blocker bug review meeting would be taking place on 2009-09-25. He asked the group to test the test compose, Rawhide itself, and the nightly Rawhide live CDs as much as possible, and particularly to try and test beta blockers bugs that required re-testing.

David Pravec said he had been talking to the Anaconda team and they were unhappy about significant changes being made to components on which Anaconda depends so close to the beta release time. The specific example raised was the major changes made to the nss package in the days before the meeting. The group discussed the problem, and agreed that there needed to be better communication between the Anaconda team and developers responsible for the components on which it relies. Jesse Keating pointed out that such changes sometimes result from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux development process, with Red Hat staff being requested to make changes in Fedora for the ultimate benefit of that product. The group unanimously felt that there should be a process for such changes which ensures that they do not negatively affect the Fedora development process, and that Red Hat Enterprise Linux engineers should be required to be considerate of Fedora deadlines and processes when making changes to Fedora. Jesse said he should be able to raise this issue with the appropriate Red Hat management staff.

Seth Vidal asked the group whether it would be acceptable to submit a new version of yum which includes history support to Rawhide prior to the release of Fedora 12 Beta. After some discussion, the group agreed that it would be an acceptable risk to make this change, as Seth had already performed some good testing on it and had a good plan for backing out the change if it became necessary.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-09-22. The full log is available. Edward Kirk noted there had been no real movement on the triage day improvement topic, but he was hoping to pull something together soon.

Edward Kirk was also looking for a way to improve the tracking of action items from previous meetings, some of which he felt had fallen through the cracks in the past. After some discussion, John5342 suggested using the team's trac instance for this purpose, and the group agreed this was a good idea. Edward Kirk volunteered to transfer any outstanding action items from previous meetings to Trac.

No-one had heard from Brennan Ashton regarding the triage metrics project in the week before the meeting.

Richard June gave an update on the kernel triage project. He was still finding that the wireless tickets he was checking were all well-filed and would not much benefit from triage. He was therefore moving to look at a wider range of kernel bugs to see if this impression held true. He was also planning to get in touch with kernel developers to get some instruction on what kinds of information they would require on particular bugs.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-09-28 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-09-29 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Fedora 12 Beta Test compose

Liam Li announced the Fedora 12 Beta test compose, a test build to check for major showstopper bugs that would appear only in the traditional installer physical media builds. Earlier, he had sent a mail detailing the types of testing that would be useful, and the results matrix page for reporting results. Several people reported failures with the test compose images, and Liam later announced an updated test compose which fixed the most significant bug affecting the earlier compose.

Bug resolution discussion

Sergey Rudchenko asked whether triagers could ever close a bug as NEXTRELEASE without reference to the maintainer responsible for the bug. Adam Williamson explained that this was rarely the case, as it would require certain knowledge of the maintainers intentions regarding which releases they intended to fix the bug in.Karel Volny asked why some of what Adam had said did not seem to match the policy documented on the Bugzilla page. Adam explained that the canonical reference for Fedora's bug process is in fact on the Wiki, and explained some wrinkles around distribution versioning, which he promised to explain on the Wiki page.