cgregan

Chris Gregan

Lead tester for the Canonical OEM Solutions Group Member of several groups including:
Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Developers
OEM Solutions Group
Ubuntu Mobile QA
Free Software Foundation
The Linux Foundation

The Latest

I joined Canonical in March of 2008 after 10 years as a professional proprietary software tester. My goal is to bring some of the formalized and highly structured QA process of the proprietary test world to Ubuntu.

As part of the OEM Solutions Group I have worked to ensure the highest quality possible for our shipping products. The latests releases of the Dell Mini line of netbooks and the HP Mini have been points of pride for my team, and we look forward to many more in the future.

The prevailing opinion is that Netbooks and MIDs are the future of computing. With the power of the latest mobile chipsets, and the costs of display/touchscreen technology shrinking fast, there is major movement in that direction. In fact we have already seen some success in the market in the form of the EeePC, iPhone, and Blackberry.

I see a bright future for the Netbook and MID platforms, and for Canonical and Ubuntu on those platforms. Especially, I look forward to many years of hot new gadgets arriving at my desk for me to play wi.......test. Smile :-)

Historical Recap

I have been a regular user of Linux and open source as a whole for over 8 years. In that time, I have gone from casual experimenter to full time user, and evangelist. I had previously been a hostile, and frustrated user of another operating system, where I felt trapped both by cost and licensing limitations. I look back with a shudder and a sigh of relief.

My first Linux PC was a hand-built 486 tower with 64Mgs of RAM running Slackware 7. The "desktop" was still mostly an after thought, and there were few online software repositories, but the experience was delightful! If you needed some software, grab it. If it didn't work, email the developer, and it was fixed. There seemed to be a steady stream of new applications and updates to existing ones.

By 2002 I had migrated all of my PCs to Linux. The desktop was now fairly mature for daily use. Mandrake and SuSe had made great strides in usability and both had thriving communities and massive repositories of software. I now saw no reason for anyone, from grandmas to grad students, to hesitate giving Linux a try. To that end, I began passing around one of my PCs to family as a demo, and even migrated a few over.

In 2005 I began hearing about a new Disto named Ubuntu. It was the first major distro to make LiveCD technology a standard part of it's releases. The first release were a huge leap forward in desktop functionality from what I was using at the time, and it was not long before all my machine had an Ubuntu image available for them, if not as their primary OS.

Since then I have been a loyal user, community member, and promoter of all things Ubuntu. Canonical continues to release top notch software that dominates in ever measure, and I always have a machine free for the next release, so I can continue to enjoy the new ways Ubuntu reinvents the desktop user experience.

In addition to Canonical, I also consult with public education and small business about the advantages of implementing open source solutions. My crowning achievement thus far is a program out of Thomas Johnson Middle School in Frederick Maryland. Here I helped start a program where students refurbish donated PCs with Ubuntu, then give them away to needy families in the local area.

The students have learned more about open source each time I talk with them, and there are now 50 needy families with Ubuntu desktops and all the advantages that come with access to a home PC.
Teacher's Blog

Closing

If you have any questions or comments about the information above, feel free to drop me an email at cgregan@ubuntu.com, or find me on several of the ubuntu irc channels (cgregan on irc.freenode.net), where I spend most of my day.

Cheers, Chris

Testing Examples - Sample Test Plan
Example for wiki bases test cases - Sample Cases

cgregan (last edited 2009-06-08 15:08:19 by 216-15-124-236)