Fedora Test Project

[Will Woods]

Hello!

So, as you may have heard, Red Hat announced (at the Summit last week in
Nashville) that they are planning to submit an Open Source testing
project to the Fedora Board. They also intend to release a bunch of
their tests and testing tools, and they really want to work with the
Fedora community to help improve the state of QA in both Fedora and Open
Source Software as a whole.

This proposed project is still in its early stages, but it goes a lot
further than just Red Hat releasing some of their tools. We are trying
to start a project to develop and maintain a wide variety of test tools,
tests, and test processes - everything you'd need to test an entire
operating system like Fedora Core. 

The first step (and, in my opinion, it's a big one) is that Red Hat will
give us part of their automated test system and a big chunk of the tests
that go with it. They want to work with us to establish a test lab to
run those tests on Fedora Core + Extras. They'll also give us
documentation on the test APIs so we can write our own tests for
Fedora-specific things. We hope to get these things working during the
FC6 test releases and providing useful information to developers and
users alike.

In the future we intend to develop and release more tools and work on
test processes for other parts of Fedora. We want programs Fedora users
can run to report bugs and help with testing. And we don't want this to
be restricted to Fedora - We want tools and tests that will work with
all Open Source software. 

Oh, and the project will need a name. "Fedora Test Project" just doesn't
cut it. And it abbreviates to "FTP". Ugh! Boring *and* confusing!

Red Hat's started the project here: http://testing.108.redhat.com/

I'm really excited about all this. My personal goal for this project is
to never hear anyone say "Fedora is just Red Hat's beta test product"
again. Help make this dream a reality!

-w