Today the Laptop Testing Project reaches a “milestone” on its path within Testing activities.
I am happy to announce the birth of the “Laptop Testing Tracker“.
Until now results were collected and organized using Wiki pages and this led to a lot of manual actions and various limitations.
Our aim was to go a bit further than that and use a more methodological and automated approach for those people that love testing and have the will to help improving Ubuntu.
How does it work?
On the tracker you will be presented with a list of available milestones to test, the stable ones like Lucid Lynx 10.04.2 and those of the current development release of Ubuntu.
Then you have to choose the architecture and, as it was already before, there are a series of testcases for you to run.
One of the great things about this program is that you will be able to know every time what to test and when just subscribing yourself to a specific ISO and test.
You are asked to complete the tests in the weeks that follow the official release of a milestone (although we encourage you to run them as soon as possible, so developers can have enough time to fix the bugs).
The laptop tracker will be used to track your results in the same way as the ISO or Desktop ones do.
With a negative result (test failed) it’s mandatory to link the test report with at least one bug in Launchpad.
Please report also positive feedback (a test passed correctly) as they are really helpful, otherwise the developers need to guess it from the lack of test reports.
When does it start?
Just NOW! You can already start testing stable releases and, as soon as Natty Beta 1 will be available next week, you can start testing it as well.
Meanwhile it’s present a fake Natty milestone just to test the tracker itself. You can use it if you want to help in that and eventual bugs about the tracker needs to be opened against Ubuntu QA Website project in Launchpad.
What should I do to participate?
Start by joining our Launchpad team, then subscribe to the QA mailing list introducing yourself and telling us about you and every laptop you want to test. In the mailing list you have also the extraordinary opportunity to gain experience on the Ubuntu development process having direct feedback from the developers.
Then create an account in the tracker (if you already have an account at iso.qa.ubuntu.com it will work as well) for every laptop you own filling in the profile with all required information.
Feel free to blog about it, tell your friends and tweet it. And, of course, start testing Ubuntu. We are going to make Ubuntu better.
You can find the full documentation on how to test on the Laptop Testing wiki page.
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