> We have 2 release-blocking media, so the total time is somewhere between
> 2-3 hours (likely closer to 2 hours, because netinst installation is way
> faster due to downloading packages from the net instead of copying them
> from the disc). That's not the main problem, though. The main problem is
> that during that time, one or two of our test machines in our office is
> fully occupied with spinning the discs, and we can't use it for anything
> else. That means all other bare-metal testing needs to wait. As Adam
> already pointed out, sometimes we need to check the final candidate
> composes in a single day, i.e. in the standard 8 working hours (and yes, we
> often work overtime in these cases). Blocking half of our bare-metal office
> test machines for 2 hours out of 8 is not a small deal.

Do you need more test hardware? Honestly, that's what this sounds like.

> It's simple to say "no user interaction is required", but that's not
> completely true either. If you want to do the QA job properly, you need to
> have an eye on the media consistency check, because we've had issues in the
> past where it timed out and either considered it a pass or fail (both are
> incorrect). So you can't simply walk away and come back and consider it OK
> when it reached the installer, you really need to watch the progress in
> certain critical points. Once the UI is ready, it is much slower than when
> booting from USB. So you often spend 10, 20 seconds staring at the screen
> until it decides to do something.

Is that due to the hardware under test, or is it a result of scratched media?