Introduction to QA - or, howto become a tester

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2013-12-16 at 11:42 -0600, Dan Mossor wrote:
> 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.

I'm sorry you feel that way! If it's any consolation, I actually think
you've been doing great so far, so you had me fooled ;) From the outside
it looks like you have things pretty much figured out already. (If
you're worried that you missed something with all the fedora.next
stuff...you really are not alone. No-one seems to be sure where that's
going. At least, I'm not.)

> 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).

Y'know, me saying I don't like something isn't the same as it being
'roundly shot down' =) I'm just one monkey with an opinion. If everyone
else thought the idea was great, we should do it.

> 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 think mentoring is a great system, and we've tried to use it in a few
efforts before. Bugzappers tried to use it when that project was at its
most active, and proven testers tried to use it when that project was
active too. Now I'm not going to draw any conclusions from the fact that
all the projects where we try to use mentoring seem to die, but...;)

Nah, seriously. It sounds like a good idea to me and I certainly don't
think we'd lose anything if we did try to do more active mentoring,
rather than the 'just say hi then ask questions if you're unsure about
anything!' approach. It is a pretty time-intensive thing, but if
existing experienced QA folks are willing to commit to it, I'm sure it
could help us bring new people on board.

> 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 really hope that's not happening, and if it is we should certainly fix
it. It does make me sad to know that the existing documentation wasn't
sufficient to give you confidence that you were doing the right thing,
though like I said, so far at least to me you seem to be doing great -
you were a huge help in getting that KDE blocker bug fixed, for
instance. I did quite a bit of work on the current front page and Join
pages back when I first joined RH, but in the last few years haven't
really sat down to see if they can be brought up to date, improved,
expanded etc. That's certainly something we could look at doing in the
down time before all this F21 stuff gets sorted out, though - is it
possible for you to say in greater detail what some of the things you
feel need to be explained better are?

> 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.

As I said, I've worked on those pages before and would certainly be
interested in helping out if you want to take a look and see if we can
make them better again! Thanks for all your efforts so far.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net