ProposalForABetterQAForUbuntu

Version: 0.3 Author: StephanHermann


(Draft) Proposal For A Better QA For (K)Ubuntu

Why should we have a QA, we have the user!

Yes, but it's a minority of the user community who will install new development branches of Ubuntu. The majority of Ubuntu users are staying with the stable release.

What does it mean "stable Release"?

"Stable release" means, that the combination of kernel and all important tools to build a Linux Distribution for the known architecture types. "Stabe release" doesn't mean, that all application, which are runtime dependent on other tools, are running properly. I will give you an example:

Ubuntu Hoary
K3B, a KDE CD/DVD/xVCD Burning Application, works with different other tools, like cdrtools, cdrdao or vcdimager. Now, in the distributed vcdimager version of Hoary, there is a bug in the filename-encoding, so K3B isn't running properly with this version. A solution can be: Upgrade the version of vcdimager to a higher revision/version with the bugfix inside, or backporting a fix to the actual version.

Well, not all bugs can be determined by internal QA or the user, depends who is faster ;), but we can be sure, that we're testing.

But what happened to bugs, which are discovered after the release?

Well, this is quite strange. The policy sais, that we have to release bugfixes for critical and/or security issues. But what I saw in the last couple of days, that we don't release many bugfixes.

Why? I can't tell you, why or why not. Fact is, the user is waiting e.g. for the Firefox 1.0.3 release. And some other users are waiting for fixing the already given functionality of some applications/tools. My proposal here is, that we should establish a team of devs and packaging experts for fixing those issues in the already stable release of Ubuntu, while others are focusing on the next release.

Why should we do it?

Because we want to be the best distribtion in the world. We want the world domination of Ubuntu!

Just joking, gentlemen.

Why we should handle things as I described ?

Other distributions have more trouble, then we have. Ubuntu has only one stable release and one unstable/testing release.

We should focus on the user community, because the users are making Ubuntu, not the developer. Ubuntu lives from the good propaganda and the good feeling spread by Ubuntu users. So, the user is the first, who should come in our mind, when we're talking about Ubuntu.

After all, if we can establish a QA team, which should be a subgroup of the Release-Management Team, we can be sure, that most of the bugs are fixed before release. And after the release, the QA Team is responsible to test the fixed applications and tools.

What do we need for this?

1. We have to establish a QA team. It should have minimum 8-10 members. Those members should know what they're doing, how they're testing. They should establish testing environments (automatic tests, tests by hand etc.) [ The number of people inside the QA team should depend on the number of packages to test and on the different domains of Ubuntu usage ]

2. A team of minimum 5-10 people who are responsible for bugfixing and backporting, 2-3 people for packaging after a stable release.

3. The release management is the root of the team. They're responsible for the work done by those teams.

Now we can discuss this proposal :)

CategoryArchive

ProposalForABetterQAForUbuntu (last edited 2008-08-06 16:18:39 by localhost)