Ubuntu Wiki

Ubuntu and me

My name is Brendan Donegan and I've been an Ubuntu user for 4 years and encountered Debian, Red Hat, SuSE and Knoppix before that. My appreciation for Ubuntu stems from the fact that, being a technical person, I like to be able to hack around and customize my system but sometimes just want to be able to get on with things. I've more recently become a very active community member, thanks in a large part to the fact that working with Ubuntu is now my full-time occupation having joined Canonical at the beginning of December 2010. I first installed Feisty on my laptop back in the autumn of 2007 and never looked back in terms of my home computing needs.

The early years of my career were spent developing in a Windows environment as a Test Engineer for Symbian Software Ltd (later Nokia and then the Symbian Foundation) so I never got as much time as I would have liked with Ubuntu, but always made sure to keep up to date. It was shortly before joining Canonical that I managed to complete the transition, having worked myself into a position where I could use Ubuntu for most of my tasks at work.

Contact Details

• brendand on freenode irc
• I have a blog about Ubuntu which I (try) to keep up-to-date

  • certifiably.wordpress.com

Contributions to the Ubuntu Community

Hardware Certification

My main workload in the Ubuntu project, as dictated by my job title of 'Hardware Certification Engineer' is to perform engineering tasks in Canonical's Hardware Certification Team (obviously!). This is essentially a QA role so pretty much involves:

• Developing and maintaining the test suite used to certify systems, i.e. writing new tests and fixing bugs in existing ones.
• Developing and maintaining the tools used to perform these tasks (some reporting scripts and test infrastructure packages)
• Executing test runs on releases of Ubuntu (as part of a team effort)
• Occasionally answering questions from the community on answers.launchpad.net related to certified systems and the process of certification.

In this way I help the Ubuntu Community by contributing to the task of ensuring that users who want to use Ubuntu have a list of systems that they can have confidence in (as seen at www.ubuntu.com/certification)

SRU Hardware Testing

As a step in the process of releasing kernel updates through the SRU process, the new kernel is tested on all of the hardware which we certified for that release. This is about 100 systems of all different types (desktops, laptops, netbooks and servers) with a wide range of components. I'm the lead engineer on this task.

Ubuntu Friendly

I have been involved with the Ubuntu Friendly project from it's inception. I took part in the discussions which established the scoring system used and as a maintainer of the Checkbox system testing tool contributed a number of fixes to tests and the tool itself. After the launch of the site and the release of Oneiric (the first release of Ubuntu which supports Ubuntu Friendly) I've also been triaging bugs raised against both the website and the Checkbox tool.

Ubuntu Bug Squad/Bug Control

I regularly take part in Bug Days as a member of the Ubuntu Bug Squad, touching about 10-20 bugs per Bug Day; and participate in the 5-A-Day program which encourages participants to triage (you guessed it) 5 bugs per day every day. I am also a member of Ubuntu Bug Control, the sub-group of the Bug Squad who have demonstrated skill at triaging bugs and are able to set bug importance and perform other restricted bug handling activities in Launchpad.

Ubuntu Community QA

Though my day job is a function of QA, I also like to participate in QA activities that are open to the community during my spare time. This allows me some time to participate in those activities which really interest me and also make a big impact. I usually take part in ISO testing.

Update Manager Contributions

As much as is feasible, I like to contribute bug fixes and other bits and pieces to the update-manager package. My contribution record so far extends to 2 bug fixes and a minor feature contribution, with another one in the pipeworks.

Conferences

I attend Ubuntu Developer Summits and ran one session at UDS O in Budapest on 'Desktop Certification'. I also participated in as many sessions as I could fit into the day. At UDS P in Orlando I ran two sessions, one on improving automated testing of kernel SRUs and another on creating customised images for performing SRU testing.