[fab] Proposed Project: Fedora Testing

[Rahul Sundaram]

Will Woods wrote:

>Hello, Fedora Board!
>
>For the past month, I have been talking to Red Hat employees and Fedora
>developers and enthusiasts about the idea of a Fedora testing project.
>
>The mission of this project would be to use and develop Open Source test
>software, test tools, and test processes to improve the overall quality
>of Fedora and other Open Source software. In short, this would be like a
>Red Hat-backed QA department for Fedora that produces things the whole
>world can use.
>
>Red Hat has committed to donating code and employee time to this
>project. They will be making code and documentation available through
>https://testing.108.redhat.com/ and employing me to lead it.
>
>To this end, I'm writing today to formally request that you consider
>making this effort an official Fedora project. A project page can be
>found on the Fedora Project wiki which gives more detail about proposed
>subprojects, goals, and so on:
>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraTesting
>
>Thank you for taking the time to consider this. If there's any further
>information needed, don't hesitate to contact me.
>  
>
I would let the test suite run on a full development cycle, get the 
community involved and show the results before accepting it as a Fedora 
Project.  This is one of the reasons if the test suite can connect to 
other machines outside of Red Hat and provide the results. Variation in 
hardware while testing is good and there might be hardware specific 
issues which Red Hat lab wouldnt be test all by itself. Looks like we 
can't do that yet. Another thing is the ability for interested testers 
to download the test suite and run the tests locally and provide the 
results back which is indeed possible now as I learned from our previous 
discussion.

There a few more related things to look into. BugZappers (bug triaging) 
needs a active team behind it. While there are few interested people, it 
is not currently well organized. There are nice improvements to Red Hat 
bugzilla that could help.  Ex: 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/core-bugs-today.cgi.  Also we need to 
make sure that bugbuddy works well as a desktop client with Red Hat 
bugzilla.

Look into cooperating with this team - 
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2006-June/msg00014.html. 


The above testing page mentions a inclusion of a FAQ. I am sure we could 
ship - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ. I even suggested this a while 
back in 
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2006-January/msg00135.html.  
Also when this discussion is finalised send the above testing suite 
roadmap to the fedora-announce list. Thanks.

Rahul