Testing
What's involved?
You can chose your level of involvement.
- Post-release testing: If you need Fedora for everyday use, run a supported public release (currently Fedora 9 and 10).
- Updates testing: If you can tolerate some instability in your desktop, you can test software in the updates-testing repositories for Fedora 9 and 10. Based on testers' reports in Bodhi, these are either released as an update for general public consumption, or withdrawn for reengineering. See QA/Updates Testing for details.
- Rawhide testing: If you have a partition or computer that you can pretty much dedicate to Fedora testing, and you would like to test the very latest bleeding-edge Fedora software, you can run Rawhide, which is updated daily. See Rawhide Testing for details.
How/where do I find bugs?
- You can report bugs as you encounter them in your everyday use of Fedora. This includes everything from crashes and serious malfunctions, to poor usability, missing or unclear documentation, or cosmetic issues.
- You can choose a component of interest and give it as thorough a testing as you have time to give. Push all the buttons, use all the command line options, verify all the documentation, review it for usability, and suggest future features. This is especially useful for software which has undergone major changes lately.
- Help is needed with for bugs tagged NeedsRetesting in BugZilla. These might be from Rawhide or a stable public release. (NeedsRetesting RSS feed)
- QA/TestPlans documents attempts to test important functionality in a systematic way, usually with multiple cooperating testers.
- QA/Tools documents scripts that can flush out potential packaging bugs, which require manual review and reporting.
- BugZappers is a triage team which helps process bugs reported by other people. Experienced testers would be useful participants, and some bugs may require retesting.
Reporting Problems
Once you have started using the development packages, it's important to give developers feedback on how they are doing. The development tree has constant changes that might affect the way applications behave in your system. It is important that developers understand what works and what doesn't in order to improve Fedora. Do not assume that a problem is known.
Make sure you are subscribed to the fedora-test-list and fedora-devel-list mailing lists for receiving daily rawhide reports about changes in the development packages and other related announcements and discussions. Feel free to post in the fedora-test and fedora-devel lists if you need any help or to initiate discussions about recent development changes or bugs. See the Communicating and getting help page for more information. If you are new to the list, it would also be prudent to read the recent archives.
Report bugs and suggest enhancements in [http:/bugzilla.redhat.com/ Bugzilla]! Use the BugsAndFeatureRequests guidelines to report them effectively.
Be prepared to file bug reports and follow up as needed with developers. The bulk of communication with developers happens through Bugzilla. The fedora-test-list mailing list is great for discussion between testers for things like bug confirmation or help trying to troubleshoot a bug you don't have enough experience with. But at the end of the day, important issues must get filed in Bugzilla to make sure the right developer sees the issue in time to do something about it for the final release. Other people in the community can help you file a useful bugreport, but you must be prepared to file. That means at a minimum registering a Bugzilla account at bugzilla.redhat.com and making some effort to familiarize yourself with the Bugzilla interface.
Qemu
If you want to use Qemu emulator for testing, look at qemu page