Introduction to QA - or, howto become a tester

[Dan Mossor]

I submitted myself for torture as a QA tester just last month, as I have
years of experience in both Linux and testing (for reference, do some
research on the USAF 346th Testing Squadron).

I jumped in with a lot of enthusiasm for the project, after having
carefully evaluated all (most) of the major distros and their
philosophies. I dislike Debian architecture in general, and abhor
Canonical, so that branch never had a chance. Arch is, well, Arch.
openSUSE is almost as restrictive as *buntu. Red Hat more or less made
Linux the product it is today, and most of my "real-world" experience
was with RHEL or CentOS systems anyhow.

But....I jumped into a very deep pool, barely knowing how to tread these
waters, and with a very short rope at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join - that page, unless you already
understand the Fedora/RH hierarchy, is confusing at best. It doesn't
really give a whole lot of info for the newbies like myself that,
although new to the project, know what we're doing and want to help.

In the KDE criterion revision thread, Mr. Ryniker proposed something
that I thought had some good ideas (
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2013-December/119494.html
). His "proposal" involved setting up a test organizational structure,
complete with test directors and test managers. This was soundly shot
down, and for good reason (structure doesn't fit into the F/OSS vision).

However, there are some points he made that I think are great ideas -
one of which was the "test mentor", someone to lead a new recruit
through the steps of becoming a Fedora tester. Since we're clamoring
about the size of the workload for QA, and needing more people on the
team, why don't we try to make it easier for people to join the team?

I'm sticking with this because I am, as my wife would say, stubborn. But
how many have thought that they would like to help, then see the wiki
pages and change their mind because there's not enough info there? I'm
willing to take on the work of fixing it, but I need to learn it myself,
first. This is where I'm at right now - I'm still learning, and by
bugging the usual suspects in #fedora-qa, I'm slowly but surely getting
there.

I feel the first thing that needs "improved" is either the base QA wiki
page, or the Join QA page. I'll plug away at it, but I would really
appreciate any help from the more "senior" members of the QA team.

-- 
Dan Mossor
Systems Engineer at Large
Fedora QA Team Volunteer FAS: dmossor IRC: danofsatx
San Antonio, Texas, USA