Release Candidate for Ubuntu 10.10

Today, the Ubuntu Release Team announced the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 10.10, codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”. Thank you to everyone who helped with the ISO testing over the last few days. As always, it was a lot of fun downloading the images, burning them to disks and testing per the test cases. And guess what? We found bugs and submitted bug reports. Refer to the known issues link below.

Ubuntu 10.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open
source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable, and suitable for testing by all users.

Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition continue to focus on delivering cutting edge technologies, while preserving a crisp and clean user-focused experience.

Kubuntu 10.10 merges the desktop and netbook images into one download and features a new application focused software manager.

Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition provides even better integration of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and other key features such as: Hadoop, Web2.0 workloads, and hypervisor technologies. Ubuntu 10.10 Server for UEC and EC2 brings the power and stability of the Ubuntu Server Edition to cloud computing, whether you’re using
Amazon EC2 or your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

Release Candidates have also been released for several Ubuntu variants: Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu.

Here’s the Technical Overview: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1010

As I mentioned earlier, there are a small number of known bugs in the release candidate that will be fixed before the Ubuntu 10.10 release, but warrant highlighting for your attention: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1010#Known%20issues

Thanks, again, for helping us ensure a high-quality Release Candidate.

Ubuntu Kernel Community Bug Day – Tuesday 5 October 2010

The Ubuntu Kernel Team is holding the next bug day on Tuesday, the 5th of October. [0] They will be addressing bugs in the New state that have been incorrectly set to New whether by well-meaning bug reporters or individuals incorrectly reopening a previously expired bug to the new status. In some cases the proper state is Triaged or confirmed. They will be attempting to correct the status mismatches as well as properly tagging bugs with the appropriate subsystems. [1]

All triagers are welcome to assist. Any questions regarding the state of a bug or any general questions can be directed to JFo in the #ubuntu-kernel channel on the FreeNode IRC server. You may also find useful information in the Kernel Wiki. [2]

[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/BugDay
[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Tagging
[2]https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/BugTriage

Ubuntu 10.10 Quality Bug Status Report – 28 September 2010

12 days left and 133 bug tasks to fix. [1]
Barring no new work, we need to fix 11 bug tasks per day now.

The focus of bug fixing should be on the following tasks:

1. The 1 Critical bug task. [2]

grub does not appear to load after maverick post-beta install
http://launchpad.net/bugs/641259

2. The 10 bug tasks that might cause a regression in Maverick. [3]
3. The 37 High bug tasks. [4]

The Canonical Foundations Team needs to deal with 6 bug tasks.
Dave Walker is the most overtasked with 3 bug tasks.
Colin Watson is rockin’ with 43 bug tasks fixed!
Monday’s hero was Matthias Klose with 4 bug tasks fixed!

Thank you for your focus on quality.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+bugs
[2]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+bugs?search=Search&field.importance=Critical
[3]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+bugs?field.tag=regression-potential
[4]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+bugs?search=Search&field.importance=High

Ubuntu 10.10 Quality Bug Status Report – 27 September 2010

There are 12 days left and 138 bug tasks to fix. [1] Barring no new work, we need to fix 11 bug tasks per day now.

The focus of bug fixing will be on the following tasks:

1. The 1 Critical bug task. [2]
2. The 13 bug tasks that might cause a regression in Maverick. [3]
3. The 41 High bug tasks. [4]

The Canonical Foundations Team needs to deal with 4 bug tasks.
Dave Walker is the most overtasked with 4 bug tasks.
Colin Watson is rockin’ with 42 bug tasks fixed!
Sunday’s hero was Chris Coulson with 1 bug tasks fixed!

Thank you for your focus on quality.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+bugs
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+bugs?search=Search&field.importance=Critical
[3]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+bugs?field.tag=regression-potential
[4]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+bugs?search=Search&field.importance=High

Maverick Release Candidate Testing

This week is Maverick Release Candidate week! Maverick’s last milestone before its final release, is going to be released this Thursday, 30 September. We should begin to see the first candidate images in the Ubuntu ISO tracker [1].

Please prepare for testing by syncing your ISOs today. You’re welcome to use the dl-ubuntu-test-iso script to perform the syncing.

The Ubuntu QA Team will be coordinating the testing at #ubuntu-testing on irc.freenode.net. Please join us at that channel and ask questions there.

If you would like more information about ISO testing is, you can review the documentation at: http://qa.ubuntu.com/testing/iso-testing/

Thanks for helping out. We appreciate your help.
[1] http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/

Upgrade Testing of UNE 10.04 to Maverick’s Unity

The Ubuntu version for netbooks, UNE, is going through a major redesign in the Maverick Meerkat release. That will soon be released as Ubuntu 10.10. The UNE 10.04 interface, which includes packages like netbook-launcher or maximus, is going to be replaced by Unity. Here’s a nice review of the brand new UNE interface.

Because this design is quite different, we would like to ask you to help us by upgrading from UNE 10.04 to 10.10 with Unity. If you would like to participate in this testing effort, just follow these easy steps:

1. Create an account in our tracker
2. Upgrade to Maverick
3. Report back

If you would like an example, please check out Ara Pulido’s upgrade experience .

Thanks for helping us to test this exciting new design!

The Canonical Ubuntu QA Team – What We Do And Why

I believe that, in addition to cadence and design http://design.canonical.com/ , the overall quality of Ubuntu is what sets it apart from any other Linux distribution available today. Of course, I can say that with confidence since I’m the Ubuntu QA Team Manager. The quality and reliability are what makes it the most popular Desktop distro for general use, while the Server image is the most popular for Amazon cloud deployments and has tight integration with the Amazon infrastructure.

The Ubuntu QA Team members who work for Canonical have a special role and set of responsibilities in ensuring the quality continues to improve with each and every six month release. Now, that we’ve reached Beta quality for the Maverick release, I thought it was a good time to reflect on what our team does and what drives and motivates us.

Ubuntu QA Team Core Values

The Ubuntu QA Team believes in a set of core values that drive and motivate us in our daily work. We are passionate about what we do and are committed to driving the quality and the exceptional user experience that results from it. Here are those values and how we bring them to reality.

Transparency through:
* Freedom – honoring the principles on which Ubuntu’s primary components are built, participating fully in the broader free software community

Innovation as defined by:
* Freshness – fostering an environment where new ideas can be explored and refined, showcasing the best that open source has to offer
* Availability – supporting a wide range of users of varying ability, culture, language and location
* Quality – ensuring robustness, reliability and security for all users

Collaboration through:
* Community – enabling all users and developers of Ubuntu, professional and volunteer, to directly participate in the project through collaboration

The Responsibilities of the Ubuntu QA Team

The Ubuntu Quality Assurance Team is responsible for improving and maintaining the overall quality of the distribution by working in the following areas:

1. Defect Management

• Evaluating, prioritizing and tracking defects discovered by Canonical and the community
• Performing bug triage and building community participation in this effort
• Working with other teams to document debugging procedures of packages to ensure that bug reports have the necessary information
• Coordinating the escalation of quality issues within Canonical (including support, OEM and HW certification issues)
• Regression bugs
• Ubuntu Bug Day
• Bugsquad mentorship program

2. Quality Control

• Continuously assessing quality through a variety of testing methods, focused on approaches which best meet the distinct needs of Ubuntu
• Performing structured testing of the desktop, packaging, upgrades and installation images
• Building community efforts around testing, including writing test scripts and performing manual testing
• Creating automated testing tools for testing, where possible
• Designing and implementing test tracking tools that provide an overview of the current state of testing
• Working with other teams to write test cases for all relevant use cases, including desktop, mobile, server and accessibility cases
• Verification of Changes
• Upgrade Testing
• Application Testing
• Pre-Release Testing
• Coordination of the Ubuntu Testing Team

3. Product Improvement

• Continuous improvement of the Software Development Life Cycle
• Digesting quality data to produce useful metrics, in order to focus developer resources on the most important quality issues
• Gathering statistical metrics from the bug data on a regular basis for use in the development process
• Tracking of key defects as part of the release process
• Providing support and advice regarding quality issues to other Canonical teams including other distro teams, OEM, support and marketing

So, how does all this work benefit the free software ecosystem? Well, stating the obvious, a high level of quality is good for free software in all its aspects. When we as contributors can provide high quality software, it makes the whole system more reliable and compelling for all users. The Canonical QA Team works entirely on free software and is dedicated to improving its overall quality. We are the most active bug triagers, so our work helps to improve overall bug management in Ubuntu, Debian and in the Upstream Free Software projects we depend on.

I hope the above provides a good summary of what the Ubuntu QA Team does on a daily basis and what drives and motivates us to do so. If you are of the same mind and would like to join our efforts, please drop us a line at ubuntu-qa@lists.ubuntu.com or visit us at the ubuntu-quality channel on chat.freenode.net.