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Stages of the Ubuntu Release Schedule

As new features are added at the beginning of the cycle, Quality assurance and the testers check for bugs and test for correct function.

Daily Builds

The daily images between milestone releases are tested on a cadence (in the case of quantal, every 2 weeks) by the ubuntu QA community.

The most important goal with these images is simply to find as many bugs as possible and report them with enough detail that they can be fixed. Finding the bugs ahead of the milestone crunch is helpful as it gives us more time to fix them. Of course finding and reporting bugs in the released milestones is also useful for improving the overall quality of the distribution.

As there is less time pressure on testing these images than the pre-release ones, we would encourage more in-depth testing on a range of hardware to flush out the deeper hidden bugs. If possible, please perform installs using a variety of methods and focus on the quality and depth of testing as opposed to the quantity.

The Dailies are automatically generated every 24 hours, the get suspended as the QA cycles kick in.

Pre-Alpha

Scary, expect them to break! At this point in the cycle the devolopers (devs) are pushing the boundaries to the absolute limit to what they would like to be in the next release. Testing is always important during this time, so that the devs have some feed back as to how things are going. The use of Virtual Machines is handy at this point.

Alpha's

With the launch of the alpha's, we are into the area of 'it should not break too often'. The pre Alpha testing is to ensure that they boot. With a bootable Alpha 1 out, the devs then go to try adding things to it and updating things to the latest versions available for things. Things may well get broken. With the test version of the Alpha 2, things are little less concentrated on getting 'new' stuff in, but checking what is fixable.

The purpose of the Alpha milestones is to encourage wider public testing of the image builds. Before we can recommend the images for public testing we must at least ensure that they have all built correctly (are not in themselves corrupt) and are at least known to boot on some machines. Some form of installation should also be tested. We do not require that these images be tested for any possible minor defect or that all possible install methods work, since that is rather the goal of the wider image testing itself. Find the show stopper bugs and get them fixed.

When an important error is found, the current frozen images are rejected and new ones are built after the fix has been applied. It is therefore important to make sure that you are testing the most recent images.

If the bug is specific to one flavour, only those will be re-built and the other flavour builds remain valid. So if we find a serious bug in the Ubuntu version we will rebuild those images, which will take several hours in total. Likewise, if we find a bug that exists across all flavors, but only on i386, we will re-build i386 and all amd64 and PPC images remain valid.

Beta and Final Release Candidates

The first glimpse of what the final release may well look like. With the Betas, we mainly switch from testing on Virtual Machines to 'Real Computers'. No changes to what applications that will be shipped from this point should be altered without a very good reason. The first Beta is for people to widely check on as many computers as possible to check if certain types of computer and their associated internal parts are having problems. The second Beta is the prelude for the final version, things are now concentrated on bug-fixing.

For Beta and Final milestones we have extended testing periods where we try to find as many bugs as we can. With the Beta we want to put our best foot forward across the distribution and want to fix as many bugs as we have the manpower for, large or small. For the Final release on the other hand, we will only fix the remaining release critical bugs. This is because seemingly small changes can have unintended consequences and break other things. Minor changes that are merely a good idea to fix will be deferred to downloadable updates.

The procedure of rejecting known bad images and continuing testing of unaffected ones also applies here as with the Alphas.

Final Release

And that, is how we test & do things. If you fancy a roller-coaster ride then do get on. You will have the ability when the Release is made, to smile to yourself and to others. And to say "I was a part of that".

Thank-you

So, you have got this far? Thank-you! We were all once new to the family that is Ubuntu and felt worthless because we had so many questions, yet felt we could never answer them for others. In testing the Lubuntu-QA team welcomes you. You are a new tester, you have hundreds of questions running through your mind. There is no such thing as a dumb question, if they are not answered on our QA page, please just ask! We have the full backing & support from the 'main' QA team for Ubuntu. We will, as testers, answer any S.O.S. request from any of our family, just as those family members will assist Lubuntu. For further information on the QA / Testing team in general, head over to Ubuntu QA. We are a family, we cannot stress how important you people are. Please do feel free to ask questions, you are very important - you can help make the instructions better.

Virtual Machines

As some testing is carried out on Virtiual Machines (VMs), a quick note on them. Like testing, it can seem very complicated, there are some excellent resources available at virtual machines (Easy to install). If you'd like to learn more about the subject of Virtual Machines, there is further informtion at Ubuntu KVM.

• Advantage: If it dies, you can restart / re-install it easily without affecting your 'main' machine.
• Dis-advantage: A VM does not fully check out your own computers' hardware setup.