FUDCon Blacksbug 2012: QA stuff

Here's the last in my FUDCon 2012 post series! This time covering QA things that happened at the event.

We had a nice group of QA folks - myself, Tim Flink, John Dulaney and Sandro Mathys were all there, plus many of our regular co-conspirators from the development, anaconda and rel-eng teams.

The 'biggest bang' we had on the schedule was a planned hackfest for testing the new anaconda UI that had been planned to land in Fedora 17, but this changed substantially on the day. The big news is that the new UI is not close to being done and won't be close to being done for the Fedora 17 timeframe, so it's no longer planned to land in Fedora 17.

So we turned the hackfest into a planning session for how we'd handle landing the new UI, then anaconda team took it over to actually work on some new UI design issues. As far as the release plan goes, we came up with the following broad agreement:

• Prior to the new UI landing anywhere, anaconda team will generate images which include the new UI for testing, and provide a quick and dirty list of what's actually testable at any given time
• New UI will be landed into Rawhide as early as possible after F17 is branched, giving the longest possible window to test it for F18
• Myself and Brian Lane will work together to try and ensure any major bugs found in the old UI and left unfixed during F16 cycle, with the justification they'd be irrelevant under the new UI, get fixed for F17, now it'll be using the old UI

This way we can take advantage of the 'no frozen Rawhide' system to provide a >6 month window for new UI testing, which should definitely help smooth out the new UI bumps for F18.

Outside of that, we had an AutoQA hackfest on Friday afternoon where Tim and John worked out some planning, and a QA presentation on Saturday which went off well. We had an Introduction to QA hackfest planning for Sunday morning, but being the first session on the day after FUDPub, attendance was around zero, and it got subsumed into the anaconda session.

We also did lots of checking in with other groups on specific issues; for example, I got a useful request for better navigation of the validation results matrix pages, we heard from Luke that Bodhi 2.0 is really going to be coming Real Soon Now, and we talked to several people on the ARM team about ramping up efforts on ARM testing. All in all it was an enjoyable and productive event.