Pardus Testing Team
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Pardus Testing Team
For every product or service that are produced by human beings, it is inevitable to contain bugs or errors. That's why quality assurance policies are needed for every product to decrease the rate of malfunctions.
The aim of Pardus Testing Team is to minimize the rate of malfunctions before the releases and after the releases. Another aim is to support the fix of bugs as soon as possible.
Contribution
Free Softwares are not developed and maintained by only the developers but also by the people who volunteers to make translations, help bug-fixing, test, contribute in terms of graphics and package the software. Testing is a good starting point to begin to contribute free software as it does not require much technical information and besides, helps in learning the softwares that are being tested.
How Can I Be a Member of Pardus Testing Team
We are expecting you to isolate the testing environment from your daily usage. You can ensure this via virtual machines, for testings inside Releases(packages, interim releases..etc.) However for testing the actual releases, testings before the releases, you definitely need a machine dedicated to this job.
Besides; you are expected to have basic skills of knowledge about Linux and Pardus. Although you are not expected to have a developer level of knowledge, questions like "What is your wireless card's name and its' vendor id?", "can you add the repo at the address xxxxxx, and then upgrade the system" should not sound unfamiliar to you.
You must register every computer you are going to use by filling the form at this adress and then send it to psts
pardus.org.tr. An example fulfilled form can be seen from here.
How are the things going on for Testing Team before a Pardus Release
Before every main release, a form is sent to the Pardus Testing Team Members, and they provide hardware information of the machines which they plan to use as a testing machine. For every system a number is assigned.
With every testing release, Pardus Testing Team Members make a fresh installation and fill in the form they are provided according to the test results in the form. After that, they send these forms to the tester list when the forms are wanted.
If any bugs appear, they are entered to the bugzilla and being tracked by the reporter and the Testing Team Responsible till the bug is closed.
Pardus Testing Team Members answer to the feedbacks from Testing Team Responsible in a certain period of time and keep on doing these things till the stable release is announced.
Reporting Before Release Tests
After the release announcement, Pardus Testing Team starts testing with the help of the guide they are provided. The succesful steps are signed as
1.1 Yes
1.2 Yes
1.3 Yes
but the steps that are failed should be written in details as much as possible and be added to the final report. The final report is send to the tester list via e-mail as a "plain-text" . The header of the post should be in the form of "Test No:NN Sistem-XXX" .
How about the Tests during a Release
Tests during a Release is different from Before-The-Release Tests as this kind of tests start at the beginning of the new stable release and goes on till the release is maintained officially. That kind of Tests are seperated into two groups: "Upgrade Tests" and "Function Tests"
Upgrade Tests
For that kind of testing mechanism, you should have a freshly installed version of both the stable release ( e.x. Pardus-2007 ) and interim versions of this release ( e.x. 2007.1 , 2007.2 , 2007.3 ). After every Test process, as we are going to need a fresh version of these installations, installing these systems as a virtual image (e.x. using VirtualBox) is useful for your own health :) We are going to use these images in update tests.
Besides, we need another virtual image that is periodically upgraded from the stable repository after every repo updates.
The Process generally works in that way: Testing Team Responsible starts an ACK process for the packages waiting in testing repository. The packages that receive ACK from the developers are merged to the current stable repository and to a temporary repository consisting of newly ACK'ed packages. Freshly installed releases are given the address of this temporary repository and being upgraded from this repository.
Every upgraded release is being tested after restarting the system, in order to learn whether system is capable of doing basic things or not. After this, it is checked with revdep-rebuild command to control if any broken distributed library files in reverse dependencies are missing.
Function Tests
For the Function Tests, the actual version of the latest stable release is upgraded from the testing repository and every upgraded program is being tested one by one.
After you make an installation once on a virtual machine such as VirtualBox, you can take a screenshot of your machine every time you upgrade it to the latest version of the stable repository, so that you can use this image(screenshot) for your upcoming tests. That prevents installing the same packages every time you use a machine upgraded to the latest version of the repository.
The upgraded release is being tested after restarting the system, in order to learn whether system is capable of doing basic things or not. After this, it is checked with revdep-rebuild command to control if any broken distributed library files in reverse dependencies are missing.
As testing all the characteristics of the programs and the libraries by the Members of Pardus Testing Team isn't possible in terms of knowledge, experience and time; the packages are classified in 3 categories: Packages to be tested in details , Packages to be tested in normal standards , Packages to be tested only in installation .
Testing Repository Adresses
For Pardus 2007 : http://paketler.pardus.org.tr/testci-2007/pisi-index.xml.bz2
For Pardus 2008 : http://paketler.pardus.org.tr/testci-2008/pisi-index.xml.bz2
Hataları Raporlamadan Önce
- Eğer kurulum hatası aldıysanız indirdiğiniz imajın sha1sum değerini kontrol edin. CD yi DAO modunda en çok 16x hızında yazdığınızı ve CD nizin sağlam olduğunu teyit edin.
- Bir hata aldığınızda aldığınız hata mesajını anlamaya çalışın kendi program ayarlarınızla ilgili bir durumdan kaynaklanmadığına emin olmaya çalışın. Bu konuda en iyi dostumuz Google ile sık sık muhattap olmaktan çekinmeyin.
- Grafik arayüzdeki programlarda aldığınız hataları konsoldan tekrar etmeye çalışın. Konsoldan aldığınız hata mesajını da hata raporunuza ekleyin.
- Aldığınız hatayı en son paketin en son kararlı sürümü ile tekrarlamaya çalışın. Sonucu hata raporunuza ekleyin.
