Fit and Finish test days (was Re: 2009-07-01 - Fedora QA meeting recap)

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 09:15 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-07-02 at 12:44 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > 1. To echo southern_gentleman, a live CD is key: you get far more people
> > showing up if you provide a live CD. See the F11 cycle test day pages
> > for examples on how to handle it (basically you just say 'up to date
> > Rawhide OR the live CD image' in the requirements section, and there's
> > another bit where you provide a link to download the live CD). Let me or
> > James know if you have any trouble generating or providing a live CD.
> 
> Thanks for the offer. As things currently stand, it looks like
> a) livecd building doesn't work reliable (failed for me, but worked for
> Adam and Fedora Unity also has rawhide spins)
> b) the isos are too large (see my mail from last night)
> c) X doesn't work (at least in qemu)

Yikes. Yeah, things can be a bit hairy this early in the cycle :|.
Obvious stuff: try again each day (for some test days we have to try for
two or three days to generate a live CD, and just use the one that works
best), and test on real hardware (ISTR reading of some brokenness
between the current X server and the driver for the graphics card qemu
emulates by default, so that could be the problem there; it wouldn't
affect much real hardware, as qemu emulates a rather odd, very old card,
something Cirrus Logic if memory serves).

>  Also, it doesn't
> > really follow the system used by previous Test Day pages. I'd suggest:
> > 
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-07-07_fitandfinish_display_configuration
> > 
> > or something similar to that.
> 
> Sure, feel free to move it there.

Alright, I'll do that in a minute.

> I'm a little torn on this one. Certainly, adding details is good, in
> general, and it certainly helps for reproducing problems if things are
> written down step-by-step. But on the other hand, we hope to find issues
> that get in the way of people using their system in the way _they_ want
> to use it for getting concrete things done, not things that don't work
> as they try to follow a recipe for testing something... So I think we'll
> have to experiment a little bit with finding the right balance here.
> I'll have a go at adding a more detailed writeup for some of the display
> configuration use cases.

Good points indeed: if you want testing to be a bit more free form, test
cases may not be the best way. I'll leave this up to your judgment
then :)

> > 4. There's a few superficial things - the intro could specify that this
> > is a Fit and Finish track test day, there's no space before ? at the end
> > of a sentence in English, stuff like that - but I'll just fix those
> > myself, I think.
> 
> Yeah, if you care about punctuation, please help yourself. I usually
> leave my Strunk at home when I go into the wiki...

OK, will do. It's not super important, but it does give a good
impression of a project that knows what it's doing, when your page is
nicely laid out and free of language issues :)

I added a new column to the Fedora 12 Test Days schedule page, to show
the schedule for fit and finish test days:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Fedora_12_test_days

does that look good to you? If not, an alternative would be for it to
have its own page, looking much like that page, called something like
Fit_and_finish_test_days , linked from the same top page
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Test_Days ).

Thanks again!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net