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Well, I think the title of this post is a bit strong, but let me explain you my point.
I work for Canonical, a 100% distributed company where the majority of employees work remotely. We meet every once in a while to work together for a week, but, normally, we don’t see each other.
I joined the company a year and a half ago and, even back then, the people who had been there for more than 3 years stated “It is big now!! Do you remember when we knew the name of everybody?”. Well, Canonical is not THAT big, but it is getting harder and harder to remember people’s name and, because it is a distributed environment, people’s faces. Even harder, we rely a lot on IRC communication so you have to match a real name, with a face, and with an IRC nickname. For me this is almost impossible to achieve.
When I wrote an email I relied too much on email addresses auto-completion and this was making the problem bigger. “I think his name started with an M, and it might continue with an E, no, wait, an I. Here he is!”. I don’t do that any more. I write a good amount of emails, but not too many to not be able to spend one minute writing down the addresses it goes to.
Canonical has an internal web tool called “Directory” where you can quickly search a person (by team, name, IRC nickname, town, manager, email address, etc.) and you will soon find the record with a picture, real name, email address and IRC nickname. Then I copy and paste the email address to the “To:” field. It does the trick for me. It helps me visualizing who I am writing to and helps me matching the face with an IRC nickname, so the next time I get a ping from someone I can see the face behind.
Does your company has such a web tool? I really recommend it.
This Thursday Karmic reaches the last milestone before the final release. As for every milestone, we need to test all the ISO images we produce, with every possible installation.
All of these test cases will appear, with instructions to follow, in the ISO tracker. If you don’t know how to use the tracker, this blog post will serve as starting guide.
One of the complains of the new comers is that they don’t know which test case needs testing. The coordination is done at #ubuntu-testing at Freenode and not everybody can access IRC. This time, Dave Morley and I, will try something new. As the RC images start appearing and testing begins, we are going to update in Twitter, using #ubuntutesting as tag.
If you want to help us testing RC images, please, follow us in Twitter and make sure to search for #ubuntutesting for updates. And if you’re helping testing, please, tweet about it!
Of course, this is an extra way to get informed. Coordination will happen, as usual, at #ubuntu-testing IRC channel.
Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Beta was released last Thursday. I am so glad to announced that we 98.9% coverage of the test cases in the ISO tracker. I would like to thank the community members that helped testing the ISOs, specially those who joined recently. Thanks! I am discussing with the Community team about the possibility of including this participation in the Ubuntu Hall Of Fame, just as the bug triagers or sponsors are.
I will blog about Release Candidate ISO testing as we approach the milestone week 
Also, and because we are getting new contributions, I would like to comment some of the reports we got, so we can improve every milestone.
Not really a failure
We got this comment, in a test case marked as failure:
I have a tablet fujitsu p1630 and the stylus works in the life cd! great, congratulations!
(missing is the calibration tool which should be loaded. The stylus is not properly calibrated and cannot reach the top line (where the application menus sit!).[...]
In the ISO test tracker we mark as failures those experiences that prevented us to do what we want to achieve in that test case. I.e. If we want to install, and the partition manager fails, that’s a failure. If we do install (or can access to the Live environement, as in this case), the test didn’t fail as such. We would mark that as success, but will link the non-critical bugs that we find.
Usability bugs are bugs
The lack of colour in the default options during installation could cause problems for new users.
The default setting of Mute, for sound could cause problems for new users.
These are great examples of usability bugs. Thanks for noticing them! Usability bugs are bugs, so do not only put them as comments in your report, also go and file bugs in Launchpad for them. They will help a lot to new users to understand how Ubuntu works.
Love Ubuntu? Want to help?
Karmic Beta candidate images have started to appear in the ISO tracker.
You don’t know how to use it? It is pretty easy!
As part as the Ubuntu Developer Week, I gave a Mago tutorial on how to add new test cases to available applications in the Mago library.
I have reformatted a bit the logs to make the reading easier and it is now part of the Mago documentation. Enjoy!
This post is going to be all about the ISO Testing Tracker. You might know it already, it’s been with us for a while. But, like old friends, sometimes you need a reminder that they are there and give them a hug. But before we continue with the tracker, let’s start with the basics:
What’s ISO Testing?
If you are reading this, you would probably know that Ubuntu has a 6-month release cycle, which means that every 6 months we have a new Ubuntu release, ready to install.
The good thing about software fixed cycles is that you can schedule anything you want. In fact, for Ubuntu, we schedule just at the beginning of the cycle up to 8 development releases. You can check at the Karmic schedule that there was an Alpha 1, Alpha 2, Alpha 3, Alpha 4, Alpha 5 and Alpha 6. And that there’s going to be a Beta and a Release Candidate before the “real” Ubuntu 9.10.
Those milestones need to be tested properly, because we release CDs for people to test on their hardware, and we have to make sure that everything is more or less OK. (with “more or less” I mean that these milestones are still software in development, so you have to be careful, anyway).
How do we track milestone testing?
So, here it is how the tracker appears in the show. Milestone releases happen normally on Thursdays. On Monday, in scheduled milestone weeks, testers start looking at the tracker looking for the candidate images: the ISOs that might be announced as the “Karmic Alpha something”. But these images need to be tested before they get announced.
How is the test tracker structured?
At Ubuntu, we produce builds for many different *buntu flavours. In the ISO Tracker we have a category for each of them. You can filter by category using the “Filter” menu in the bottom left of the page. That would allow you to concentrate in the flavour you want to test.
Filter by category
Once you select a category, you will be able to select an image to download for that category. A category like “Kubuntu” may have different images: i386 Live CD, amd64 alternate, etc., and all of them need to be tested before releasing a milestone.
Kubuntu Karmic Alpha 6 images
If you click now in any of those images, you will have access to a direct link of the ISO to download and a selection of tests that you may run for that image. For every test, there is a link to the test case description in the test case wiki. The test cases are easy to follow when running any of them.
So, to sum up, every category contains a set of ISO images and every image contains at least one test case.
Iso Tracker structure
How do I help?
As I wrote before, the week of the release of a milestone we need a lot of help testing the candidate images. If we want full coverage we need to run more than 150 test cases. If you have a spare machine or a virtual machine installed, you can help making Ubuntu better by running the untested test cases during the week of the release of a milestone.
First thing, you will need an account in the ISO tracker. Unfortunately, your Launchpad Open ID won’t work for this site (indeed something that needs to be improved). Click on “Log in” and fill the requested data. As the page explains, if you already have an account in Ubuntu Brainstorm, you can use it for the ISO Testing Tracker.
Create a QA account
Once you have an account just select the image you want to test, choose a test case for that image, start running the installation in a virtual machine or a spare machine and report any bugs you may find in Launchpad.
Once finished, you have to report back in the ISO Testing Tracker. Click on the test case you have run and report Pass/Fail depending on your success. You can also add the bug numbers of the bugs you found. They will be linked to the Launchpad bug and it will help the release team to track them.
Please, report back!
The time is NOW!
Next week, on Thursday 1st of October, we are releasing Ubuntu Karmic Beta, which eventually will become Ubuntu 9.10. This is a very important milestone, because many people upgrade during the beta, so it is very important to release something very stable at this point. From Monday, 27th of September, we will be testing the candidate images at #ubuntu-testing. I will send reminders to the different mailing lists later this week and at the beginning of next week, but you can start right now creating your account and making yourself familiar with the ISO Testing Tracker.
Help us releasing Ubuntu better and better every 6 months! And remember that we are always at #ubuntu-testing if you need to ask any question!
It is great to see more and more people interested in Mago.
When I started the project about a year ago (by that time it was called Ubuntu Desktop Testing), it was an in-house project I created to solve the problems I was having on the desktop testing I had to do as part of my daily job.
Up to three sessions at the Ubuntu Developer Week, a talk at Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, some UDS and two changes of name later, Mago seems to have found its path and we are seeing a lot of new contributors adding fantastic ideas to it.
To avoid losing any of these ideas, I have created a Roadmap in the Mago site to track the status of the new Mago features. Please, check it out to see what’s happening on the Free Desktop testing automation world.
Today everything went smoothly:
- Starting the day, Nagappan released LDTP 1.7, which comes with one my wanted features, uptime measures. Perfect to test Notify-OSD timings, i.e.
- Then I received an email from Debian LDTP maintainer, reminding me that we should be changing python-gnome2-desktop dependency, which is now deprecated.
- I packaged the new upstream version for Ubuntu and also changed the deprecated dependency.
- Then, the packaging training gang did an on-call review session, where you could talk directly to the sponsors and ask them to review your package. I attended and Colin Watson kindly reviewed my changes.
- I attached a new diff.gz to the bug report with the changes Colin had suggested.
- I went for lunch. By the time I came back the new LDTP package had been sponsored and uploaded to universe. Again, just in time before holidays and Karmic feature freeze.
Teamwork rocks!
Earlier this month, Michael Bolton (not the singer, but the software tester), wrote about testability of software. Basically he answers the question of how to increase software testability and if it involves something more than making it easier to automate.
Testability is anything that makes the program faster or easier to test on some level.
Indeed it involves a lot more.
His explanation is very concise and it gives useful tips to increase testability. If you are writing any kind of software, I recommend you reading his post to improve its testability.
Why should we care about testability? I guess it is hard to think about every non-functional risk when writing an application. Not only you have to make it work, but now you also have to think about performance, accessibility, usability, and now, if all that was not enough, testability.
Making a software easier to test not only makes testers’ jobs easier but also it gives more time to developers to fix the issues before the release, as bugs can be found earlier in the cycle.
Not long ago I filed a couple of bugs in Notify OSD that, if fixed, they will make Ubuntu’s notification system easier to test. They do not imply making the application easier to automate, they are just a couple of bugs about improving its logging system. Making an application logging system more intelligent is just an example of an easy way to improve its testability.
I’ve added the tag “testability” to these two bugs and will start to do the same with the bugs I find that makes testing harder. If you are a software tester or a developer that cares about testing, do the same. Usability, accessibility, testability, performance; they all share a common objective: making software better.
Jono asked about thoughts on why women are such a minority in open source communities. I already talked with him and Matt about the topic during GCDS, but I would like to write down my thoughts and experience.
From my point of view, there isn’t just one reason. I will talk about the reasons why I don’t feel completely comfortable in the FLOSS communities. I cannot generalize, extrapolate and conclude that those are the reasons why women are a minority, but I can offer my experience as an example.
ONE MERIT – Meritocracy is one of the greatest things (and one of that I love most) about free software communities. At the beginning you don’t need to be someone, or know someone or know someone who knows someone. You just do and get credit for it. Theoretically no matter who you are, your gender, sex orientation, race or origin. Problem is that normally only one merit is taken into account: hacking hours. “Show me the code!” is the motto here. Nobody says: “Show me your strategic plan!”, “Show me your documentation!”, “Show me your funding efforts!”. Although it is now changing a bit (a great example would be the Ubuntu Hall of Fame, which gives credit not only to developers, but also to translators, PR people, and the alike), the motto is still “Show me the code!”. All-night-long hacking? 95% of the times that person would be a man.
SEXISM – Maybe is not that relevant, at least for me, because there is sexism everywhere. We have to fight against it, but we have to continue with our lives in the mean time. But it does exist. Oh, really it does. Let’s transcript a conversation I had during GCDS as an example (my thoughts while it was happening, in brackets):
Guy: Mmmm, it only took me two days to realize that chicks from Barcelona are way hotter than those from Gran Canaria
Me: Yes? Only two days to arrive to that conclusion? That’s fast! (What???? Why is he telling me this?? Talk to me about weather, please)
Guy: Yes. I pay a lot of attention.
[...]
Guy: So, what did you study at university?
Me: Computer Science
Guy: What??????? Since when *chicks* are starting to study Computer Science?
Me: … (Mmm, people like you make me think that I made the wrong decision)
LACK OF AFTER-WORK BEER SPIRIT – When I worked for software companies outside the free software world I used to love Friday after work beer. We’d go to a pub, have a couple of beers and talk about anything but work. OK, sometimes we talked about work, but it was more in the sense of complaining about the bosses and things like that. Normally conversations were about love, life, future, past, present, etc. When I go to conferences now, after all day hacking, listening to new technologies, plan new projects and/or collaborations, which is great, what I need at 6pm is a break. Sometimes I feel that the only way to have that break is just going for a walk on my own. Going to a pub for a beer and keep listening to conversations about CouchDB, GNOME Shell, Clutter, OpenGL, pro Mono rants, against Mono rants, etc. does not seem like a break for me.
OH, IT’S A GEEK WORLD – It is a pity that free software communities are so geek. Not in the sense that I don’t like geeks, I would consider myself a geek, but in the sense that if you’re not, it is difficult to enter (or if you enter, to survive). It is a pity because free software is great. It is great because of the technology, it is great because is open, it is great in the sense of libre. People should be willing to know more about it, but I understand the entry-level barrier. I consider myself a geek, and I find difficult to survive because I am not *that* geek. For a non-geek it has to be even harder. And, let’s face it, men are geekier than women.
I guess these are the main reasons why I don’t feel 100% happy about being in an open source community. And that’s a pity, because I love the spirit and theory about software libre. I should feel like I was in the best job ever.
