FWN/Beats/QualityAssurance

QualityAssurance

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

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days

Last week's planned Test Day on internationalization (i18n) was postponed to a yet-to-be-determined future date. Our apologies to anyone who made time to attend.

Two Test Days are scheduled for next week. The first is on the confined SELinux users feature. This feature involves assigning an SELinux role to a user. The role's policy controls the extent of the user's access to the system. The Test Day will focus on testing several scenarios to ensure the policy restrictions work as they should. As usual, there will be a live CD available for testing - there's no need to install Rawhide. The Test Day will run all day on Thursday 2009-10-20 in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

The second Test Day will be on power management, especially specific improvements made in Fedora 12. Some very specific but easy-to-run test cases which will greatly aid the development team in refining power management have been developed for the Test Day: there's even a helpful script which runs the tests and generates the need results automatically. As usual, there will be a live CD available for testing - there's no need to install Rawhide. This Test Day will be very easy to participate in, and the information you can generate will be very helpful, so please come along and help out! The Test Day will run all day on Thursday 2009-10-22 in the #fedora-test-day IRC channel.

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 or 13 cycles, 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 2009-10-12. The full log is available. James Laska reported that the new hardware which would be used to host the israwhidebroken.com project and other parts of the AutoQA project is in transit.

James Laska had contacted the Anaconda development team to check if the recent installer test days had identified any Beta blocker bugs. He found that the first test day had resulted in three blockers being added to the list. Jesse Keating worried that too much testing was being done after the Beta freeze, which made resolving identified bugs very difficult. James felt that extensive testing was being done both before and after the freeze. Jesse believed some of the blocker bugs that were found after the freeze date could have been found earlier. James agreed to investigate the bugs in question to see when they were introduced and when they were identified.

James Laska reviewed the status of the first Beta release candidate build, and noted status on the last remaining beta blocker bug was unclear. Denise Dumas said that Dave Lehman would investigate and report whether the bug was fixed in the release candidate build, and hence whether a second release candidate build would be required. James, Liam Li and Rui He had already started validation testing on the release candidate build.

Will Woods reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. He had been working on backlinking from the test status information on israwhidebroken.com to the actual test result in the autotest front end, but had not yet found a satisfactory solution. He had also been looking at auto-generating a Wiki page to list the critical path packages (as the set of critical path packages can change unpredictably, a manually-maintained static page is not a good solution). His plan for this is blocked by the Python interface to the Wiki using JSON, which cannot create or edit pages. Will and James Laska agreed that James would work on creating a package of the israwhidebroken.com code to be used for the production instance of the site. Kamil Paral reported steady progress on his packagediff test for identifying major changes between package versions. He had initial implementations of most important tests, and was working to generate fake packages so he can test the script and isolate any bugs in it. The group agreed that in the long term it would make sense to integrate Kamil's work as extensions to the existing rpmdiff tool, but in the short term it could be hosted as part of the AutoQA project.

Jóhann Guðmundsson explained his project to revise and standardize Wiki pages dealing with debugging and reporting bugs in various components. He had created a template for such pages and revised several existing pages to fit this new template. The group discussed a standard naming convention for such pages, and agreed on How_to_debug_(component name). Jóhann mentioned that he would welcome feedback on the usefulness of the existing pages, which would be the most important ones to revise, and what new pages of this type should be created.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting was held on 2009-10-13. Adam Williamson commented on the QA group's discussion of Jóhann Guðmundsson's debugging page revision project, noting the agreement on the How_to_debug_(component name) naming convention.

Edward Kirk noted that housekeeping tasks, which would have been starting that week, had been delayed due to the overall release schedule delay occasioned by the delay of the Beta release.

Adam Williamson noted that Richard June was not present to give an update on the kernel triage project, nor was Brennan Ashton present to discuss the triage metrics project.

Sergey Rudchenko wanted to know if there was a way to have Bugzilla notify him of new bugs being filed on a particular component, but not of any change activity to existing bugs, as he found the volume of email with all the change messages included overwhelming. Edward Kirk suggested that he use the RSS feed search result feature for this. Any Bugzilla search can be used as an RSS feed in Red Hat's Bugzilla, so to achieve the desired result you can simply search for NEW bugs in any component and subscribe to the feed for the search result. New bugs for that component will then be shown on the feed.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-10-19 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-10-20 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

DeltaISO update

Andre Robatino reported that he was unable to generate DeltaISOs on Rawhide as a side-effect of the endianness issue in xz which had been previously discussed by the development group. Andre later announced DeltaISOs for Beta test compose -> Beta RC1 and Beta RC1 -> Beta RC2.

Fedora 12 Beta RC2 testing

Liam Li announced the formal testing process for the second release candidate build of Fedora 12 Beta. He noted that the test matrix was available and asked for the group's help in performing as many of the tests as possible. Cornel Panceac wondered why there were no live images available. Jesse Keating explained that he had had to delay building the live images until he was sure the regular installer images were OK due to resource constraints.