FWN/Beats/QualityAssurance

QualityAssurance

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

There was no Test Day last week, as we are deep in the Fedora 11 final release run-up.

Currently, no Test Day is scheduled for next week - it is too close to the scheduled release of Fedora 11 for any testing to produce results directly in Fedora 11 final release, but if you would like to propose a test day which could result in changes for post-release updates, or an early test day for Fedora 12, please contact the QA team via email or IRC.

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting was held on 2009-05-20. The full log is available. Adam Williamson reported that he had filed a ticket to have Bodhi use the appropriate resolution for bugs fixed with stable release updates. Luke Macken said he would take care of the ticket. Adam also reported that he had not yet remembered to ask the Bugzilla team to add a link to the Fedora bug workflow page.

James Laska reported that he had not yet sent out a Test Day feedback survey to previous participants, but had a draft ready and would continue to work on it.

John Poelstra said that he had not yet finalized a schedule for blocker bug reviews during the Fedora 12 cycle, as the overall Fedora 12 cycle was still not finalized. He will revisit the issue next week.

Will Woods reported there had been little work on the autoqa project or adding upgrade test cases to the Wiki during the week, as testing for Fedora 11 release had taken priority.

The group discussed the Fedora 11 release situation, and noted that the release had been pushed back one week. They examined the blocker bug list, and found it was generally manageable. Francois Cami noted that major fixes to X.org's core or the ATI driver were unlikely as Dave Airlie is on vacation. The group noted that most remaining X.org blockers were in the Intel driver, and assigned to

The group then discussed the Fedora 11 Common Bugs page. Adam Williamson volunteered to revise the existing page to match the format used for previous releases, initiate a few other changes based on his previous work on Mandriva Linux Errata pages, and talk to other groups about the use of the page, including the Documentation group, and the IRC, mailing list and forum support teams. Francois Cami volunteered to help ensure all appropriate X.org issues are tracked on the page.

In open discussion, Francois Cami noted that for Fedora 11, users of several generations of ATI Radeon cards would now only have the free drivers as a viable choice, whereas previously they would be able to use the ATI proprietary driver from third-party repositories. It was also noted that, at release time, the commonly-used RPMFusion repository would have no packages available for the proprietary driver even for cards for which it is still available, due to the lack of a reliable patch for kernel 2.6.29. The group discussed whether this could be explained in the release notes (with no definite resolution, but advice to check with the Documentation team), and how to note the requirements for a full and useful bug report for problems with the free driver from such users. Adam Williamson noted that the appropriate venue for such information would be the Bugs and Feature Requests Wiki page.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-05-19. The full log is available. John Poelstra reported on progress of the housekeeping changes for Fedora 11's release, and the group agreed that he was doing a fine job and should keep it up.

Adam Williamson reported on the progress of the triage metric system. Brennan Ashton has again been busy (and without access to a regular internet connection), so progress has been slow. Adam clarified that the main choke point now was the lack of a set of test data for the scripts, to ensure that they were working correctly, and explained he was doing his best to get this data made available. Once it is available, work on the system is no longer solely dependent on Brennan being available.

Adam Williamson also reported on the progress of the proposal to include setting the priority / severity fields as part of triage. He had sent out the mail asking for feedback on how to proceed, but had received none yet. The group agreed that he should send out another mail as a new thread, and set a deadline of the end of the week; if no significant feedback to the contrary was received by that point, the group agreed they should proceed using the method proposed by Matej Cepl.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-05-27 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-05-26 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Blocker bug review meeting

John Poelstra announced a joint QA / Release Engineering Fedora 11 blocker bug review meeting on Friday 2009-05-22. The meeting was not logged, but all outstanding release blockers were reviewed, some were closed or downgraded, and action plans were decided for several.

Adobe Flash installation instructions

Christopher Beland explained that he had updated the Wiki page on Flash with the latest instructions on installing it on x86-64 systems. Adam Williamson noted that the page should emphasize free software alternatives as well as the proprietary Adobe Flash system. Paul Frields announced that he had made such a change.

Fedora 11 Common Bugs page

Adam Williamson announced his revisions to the Fedora 11 Common Bugs page, and asked the group to contribute to expanding and maintaining the page and consistently refer to it when explaining problems. He also explained some of the planned improvements to the content of the page and its interaction with Bugzilla.

Mozilla / Beagle blocker bug proposal

Jonathan Kamens asked whether a bug preventing Beagle from searching Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird data should be a release blocker, on the basis that desktop search is a key function for some users and web browser and email data are important sets which someone may wish to search. Brian Pepple pointed out that it did not meet the official release blocker criteria, but Jonathan responded that the page admits this is a subjective judgment, and many bugs that do not strictly meet those criteria are in fact considered blockers. In the end, it was mostly agreed that, because Beagle is not installed by default and so is not considered core functionality, the issue should not be considered a blocker.

New Bugzappers

Two new Bugzappers volunteers introduced themselves this week: Xia Shing Zee and Alex Turner.