Fedora 11 Test Day survey

[Andreas Thienemann]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, James Laska wrote:

> ===================================
> 
> 1. How did you find out about Fedora Test Days?  

Planet.fp.o

> 2. Was sufficient documentation available to help you participate in a
> Fedora Test Day?  If not, what did you find missing or in need of
> improvement?

Sure. But I'm running rawhide anyway on several machines and am probably 
not really representing the average user.

 
> 3. Did you encounter any obstacles preventing participation in Fedora
> test Days?  How might they have been avoided?  Did you discover any
> workaround?

Feature rewrites such as the storage rewrite has made installation tests
basically infeasable as the installer always broke during partitioning on
my systems. Feedback from the developers was great and instant and we
identified and fixed several of these problems on the same day. This can
be considered a success of the test day but in my case, we never came
around to testing later stages of anaconda.

The live CD might help in some cases e.g. a nouveau test but would be
mostly useless for installer-related tests. I guess more care should be
taken into identifying "known-good" snapshots and testing with these where
we made certain that there are no other, unrelated bugs interfering with
the aim of the test day.


> 4. Were you able to locate and download installation media for testing?
> Did it function as expected?

Never tried livecds but yeah, my PXE server is doing great for installs. 
Thank you for asking. *g*

 
> 5. What follow-up actions do you expect after the Test Day?  Are your
> expectations currently being met?

I'd like to see bugs fixed as the follow-up action.

Some have been verified and put up as F11Blocker or F11Target with not
much more happening. In some cases the Needinfo requests for rechecking or
further info came up only a few days earlier and I haven't gotten around
to them yet as the test systems are not always available to me. Faster
turnaround times would be great there as I have easier access to the
machines in question.

Some of my bugs have not been fixed yet, but I have to admit that these 
are unusually difficult to track down or fix. :)


> 6. Would you participate again in future Fedora Test Days?

Sure, time permitting.

 
> 7. Do you have any more general comments or any suggestions for
> improving future test days?

I strongly support the newfound focus on QA. I think I mentioned that to 
Adam on IRC repeatedly and wrote something about it in my FESCO 
nomination questionare as well but I'll repeat that:

It has long been common opinion that Fedora is spending too much time on
developing exciting new features while not spending any on ironing out the
bugs. Certain show-stoppers have been persisting through 4 releases and
more or some bugs "are now reaching the age where they should seriosly
start thinking about attending kindergarden". While this is a great quote, 
due to its humourous value, it shows a real problem we're having.

This has hurt our marketing tremendously.
Seeing news about Test Days, revitalized QA etc. helps us fighting this 
impression.

So thank you for your work.


regards,
 andreas