For what it's worth,
From the - admittedly little - running I have done with 14.04, it seems pretty stable and a very solid effort has been made testing new features and bug fixes, congrats.

Biggest concern of mine are regressions. Over the last few upgrades (or fresh new installs) I have done, I spent a fair amount of time making things work in the new version that worked flawlessly in the old.  "Exploratory Testing" might be useful here. I work in product development and for a new product, we usually find about half of the bugs outside the formal, structured testing.
In particular, I am concerned about hardware support, chief among those is wireless and Optimus graphics. I have only one computer with that hardware and I also use that laptop to make a living. In order to test the hardware I would like to see bumblebee on the Live CD so I can test this functionality without risk (as remote as that may be) of messing up my prime OS. In this context I would have been happy to do a bunch of the "Exploratory Testing".

I would also suggest to actually test the distro with not-so-savvy users, to gauge how this really works in real life for a noobie (presumably a Windows XP convert): hand him/her a DVD and say "here, try this" and see what happens. This would tell us
- robustness against unexpected inputs and maybe a weird order in which people do things
- clarity of the UI guiding a new user through the installation and applications. Thinking about (former) XP users, the menu structure for applications is a bit foreign

Some other ideas to facilitate testing:

Provide an app that gathers all info automatically that might be useful for trouble shooting (hardware, software versions, you name it, probably a concatenation of lshw, ifconfig, ps -e and dpkg -l along with log files). One click and all pertinent info is there. I know I can do this easily on the command line but it would be nice nevertheless to do it with one click, especially for a casual tester.

put xnee on the distro to facilitate stress testing from the Live CD. I have had plenty of apps that do OK if a function is performed once but crash after the same action is done a few dozen times

When upgrading an older version, have a capability to automatically generate a backup (provided there is a partition around to do so) of the installed system with a "Go back" option. In my case, I'd feel a lot more comfy installing an early test version on my drive if I had a convenient way to go back in case something gets REALLY busted, like grub (I do my own backup of course but it would still take several hours to restore and an unattended automatic go-back I could run at night so I wouldn't waste work hours restoring my PC)


Not sure what the "optional applications" are that were referred to in the original email. If it includes apps that one would need in order to use Xubuntu in the business world, e.g. Libre, I don't think testing should be included. A PC does me no good if the only it can run is its OS :)
I do think it's OK to do less testing on non-LTS releases, especially regression testing.



Lutz Andersohn

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On 03/20/2014 01:54 PM, PK wrote:
My two cents:

I think it's good if the main quality focus is on the LTS. The short-lived intermediate versions don't interest me much; I see them as a testbed for innovations, and not as "work horses" that require extra attention for stability and reliability. "Want stable? Go LTS!" is a simple message that everyone can easily understand and approve of, I think.

In 14.04 LTS an important step has been made towards modernization: the Whisker menu and the single desktop bar. Excellent. Cool and slick. Nice artwork, beautiful deep blue wallpaper. Radiates quality in a restrained way.

One thing I'd really like (ceterum censeo, as the Roman statesman used to say), is to see Abiword and Gnumeric being replaced by LibreOffice. It would make the default installation so much better.... First impressions matter a lot.

Regards, Pjotr.


2014-03-20 14:18 GMT+01:00 Elfy <[email protected]>:
A lot of work has gone into QA from all sides this cycle.

What I'd like to get from replies to this mail is what you thought could have been done better, what could have happened sooner, thoughts for what we could do in the next cycle.

As an example,  we're looking at Exploratory Testing either on it's own or in conjunction with calls from us to test areas. Simply put - use the applications you normally do and report problems.

The problem I can foresee with that is that we'd get little testing reported without calls.

Another idea I'm toying with at the moment is not worrying so much about testing packages marked as optional - having a different set of tests for non-LTS releases ...

Ideas people - think outside the box if you've time :)

Hopefully we'll get some ideas that will make everyone's life a bit easier during the 14.10 cycle and on

Elfy
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Ubuntu Forum Council Member
Xubuntu QA Lead

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