Re: User-testing of testing?
On 08/10/2010 03:43 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 11:40:29AM +0100, Enrico Zini wrote:
>> So I was wondering if we shouldn't have a list of user-centered
>> "stable release goals", such as "open a PDF attachment in icedove",
>> "open an OpenDocument attachment in icedove", "watch youtube videos",
>> "copy a file to a USB key", which people trying a fresh testing
>> install could test.
> <snip>
>> I however do not see an obvious way of collecting feedback for such user
>> tasks, or for having fights over which user tasks are the most
>> significant, without having people submit tasks to the release managers
>> and the release managers deciding which ones are worth making official,
>> which would be quite a burden to them.
>>
>> Are there ways to set up such a thing so that it mostly manages itself?
>
> I don't know a specific answer on your questions, but I do have some
> lateral thinking/discussion to report. At DebConf10, I've spoken with
> Philipp Kern about how to invite our users to test Squeeze before we
> release it. We have agreed on the fact that we can do better than past
> releases on that and the rough idea was to send out a press release
> inviting willing users to do upgrades from Lenny to frozen Squeeze and
> report the issues they find. We discussed how the best moment to do that
> would have been post-freeze and it turns out that this is exactly *that*
> moment.
>
> The TODO list to go forward with this is:
>
> - Decide where user feedback will have to go; the obvious answer is the
> BTS, but we need to decide whether reuse some existing (pseudo)
> package or create a new one for the occasion. IMHO it should be
> something quite obvious for the users such as "squeeze" or
> "squeeze-upgrades" or something like that.
There is upgrade-reports just for that reason...
> - Draft a text to send out as press release, the title should probably
> be something like "User testing sought to improve the quality of the
> forthcoming Debian Squeeze". The debian-publicity@lists.d.o is
> wonderful for reviewing this kind of stuff, but we need first to
> decide the content of the press release. I propose the following main
> points:
>
> - please test upgrades from lenny to (frozen) squeeze
> - please test ISOs/d-i
This is especially a good idea once d-i beta is released...
Some of the issues that will be found for upgrading or for installing
will just have to be fixed, others probably need to be documented in the
Release Notes.
> I believe that what you are looking for can later on be extracted from
> user reports ... but of course we will need to find out a group of
> Debian volunteers to do that triaging. The latter can probably be found
> easily if the release team agrees on sending (later on) a specific call
> for help via d-d-a (I'm kind of reluctant to add such duty to the
> release team, given that they will be super-busy in the near future with
> unblock requests and in getting the RC bug count down).
This is mainly the difficult part from previous experiences, though I
hope it will be easier to find volunteers this time! :-)
Cheers
Luk
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