QA team key positions
The QA team has vibrant communities around both bug triage and testing. Community contributors and Canonical employees share a range of key positions between them such as bugmaster, QA website developer and Windows-related test lead. This model where one or two team members take primary responsibility for a certain topic has evolved organically as people have simply taken on responsibility for certain tasks. It works really well though and we would like to build further on that approach. At a recent QA team meeting we agreed on three new QA team positions:
Kernel bug first-response
Description: Provide initial response to new kernel bugs and perform initial triage
Rationale: The kernel is a complex package to triage — many bugs are hardware-specific and difficult to reproduce independently. It is therefore important to have efficient communication with the initial reporter so the relevant debugging information can be collected while the bug is still relevant. Faster bug response will also help improve the perception of our bug work.
Responsibilities:
- Be subscribed to New kernel bugs and provide a response to the reporter
- Perform basic triage following Kernel Team bug policies, asking for additional information as appropriate
- Work closely with the kernel bug lead and the kernel team to identify potentially high-impact issues
Test image maintainer
Description: Configure and maintain ready-to-use virtual images for testing Ubuntu and upstream code.
Rationale: Bugs filed in Ubuntu are often best fixed by the upstream developers who know the code base best. But first we should confirm that the bug is also present in the raw upstream version rather than one introduced by Ubuntu-specific changes.
Responsibilities:
- Configure ready-made VM images (KVM or VirtualBox) with the Ubuntu development release of Ubuntu and Debian testing
- Update the images weekly and make them available for download
- Maintain documentation on using and updating the images
Forums feedback coordinator
Description: Liaison between the QA and forum communities
Rationale: The Ubuntu forums represent a huge resource with people of all skill levels, able to provide useful testing and debugging of Ubuntu. Some guidance in how to use our development resources properly would improve the flow of information between the forum and the QA team.
Responsibilities:
- Point forum users to the right QA resources in discussions about bugs or testing
- Help forum users file bugs in Launchpad
- Keep the forum community informed of the activities of the QA team, including bug days and testing and invite participation
If you are interested in taking on one of these challenging positions, please send your application to the ubuntu-qa mailing list and turn up at the next QA team meeting so we can ask further questions and vote. Current members of the team and people new to QA are all invited to apply. See the key QA positions wiki page for more information.
Note for clarification: These ‘positions’ do not represent job postings (even though they have a similar format) but key roles in the open QA team that we encourage people to take responsibility for.
Comments are off for this postUME testing
As you may know, the Ubuntu team is working on a mobile version of the OS for mobile internet devices. But because there isn’t much of this hardware around, the UME builds don’t get the natural community testing that the desktop and server editions do. But if you are interested there is a way you can help! 
The mobile environment can run in a Xephyr window. Setting up this environment is fairly easy and is described in detail here.
If you want to help with structured testing please follow the UME test cases starting with the desktop test. And if you find any bugs please file them under the ubuntu-mobile project in Launchpad.
If you have questions you can usually find cgregan, davmor2 or myself (heno) in the #ubuntu-testing channel. Have fun 
Ubuntu needs easy backup
Most people don’t make backups until they lose all their data at least once. And even the, they only do it if it’s quite easy. Several simple backup solutions have been suggested for Ubuntu, but nothing has been integrated with the desktop so far.
I think it’s important that we get this right. Please vote for it here:
Oh, and do note the very cool link images available for promoting your ideas on Brainstorm 
5 printing bugs a day
I’ve decided to focus on a specific category of bugs for my 5-a-day participation: printing. This touches about 25 different packages including cupsys, foomatic, gutenprint and ghostscript. There are about 400 open printing bugs ATM.
I’m not a developer but there is also a lot of triage work needed on these bugs. Till and the other devs working on printing are already doing a great job on fixing bugs, but can always use a bit of help on getting them from New to Triaged. I like to divide my work into blocks, so I probably won’t get to this every day, but I’ll aim to do about 35 a week in 1 or 2 sessions.
Thanks Daniel and Jono for organising the 5-a-day bug project!
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My 5 today: #189510 (cupsys), #189508 (gnome-print), #185794 (cups-pdf), #190630 (hplip), #150516 (gutenprint)