Planet LDTP

* What am going to do there?

1. Debian Workout: Where we are going to get some more ‘people’ hacking on Debian packaging. My focus will be on collaborative-maintainance, RC Bug Fixes, things we could not finished last year (I wasn’t there, but Kapil took the lead..). Kunal & friends are very much interested in fixing some things in `reportbug’ – so it will be fun.
2. Debian Development BOF: This is all about things we did in ‘talks’ in last years. BOF is better than ‘talk’. I’m going to re-prove it!

Well, I think the title of this post is a bit strong, but let me explain you my point.

I work for Canonical, a 100% distributed company where the majority of employees work remotely. We meet every once in a while to work together for a week, but, normally, we don’t see each other.

I joined the company a year and a half ago and, even back then, the people who had been there for more than 3 years stated “It is big now!! Do you remember when we knew the name of everybody?”. Well, Canonical is not THAT big, but it is getting harder and harder to remember people’s name and, because it is a distributed environment, people’s faces. Even harder, we rely a lot on IRC communication so you have to match a real name, with a face, and with an IRC nickname. For me this is almost impossible to achieve.

When I wrote an email I relied too much on email addresses auto-completion and this was making the problem bigger. “I think his name started with an M, and it might continue with an E, no, wait, an I. Here he is!”. I don’t do that any more. I write a good amount of emails, but not too many to not be able to spend one minute writing down the addresses it goes to.

Canonical has an internal web tool called “Directory” where you can quickly search a person (by team, name, IRC nickname, town, manager, email address, etc.) and you will soon find the record with a picture, real name, email address and IRC nickname. Then I copy and paste the email address to the “To:” field. It does the trick for me. It helps me visualizing who I am writing to and helps me matching the face with an IRC nickname, so the next time I get a ping from someone I can see the face behind.

Does your company has such a web tool? I really recommend it.

If you think that testing software is an unskilled activity that “even a two-year-old can perform”, keep reading, I’ll try to change your mind. If you do not agree with that sentence, keep reading, you may be interested in joining us.

Software testing is generally seen as the poor cousin of programming. While the bad reputation of testers happens in all software environments, this is more common in free software communities, probably because the “show me the code” motto is too deeply attached to the open source communities. This, unfortunately, is too often translated in unreliable software released with a lot of bugs (some of them critical).

Testing software, as any human activity, is a task that almost everybody can perform to some sort of proficiency. However, that does not mean that it is an unskilled activity. You have to know what to do. You need to have (or to develop), among others, excellent communication skills, technical writing skills, software architecture knowledge, technical research expertise, a critical mindset, etc.

We cannot leave quality to good luck. We cannot rely in having millions of users who will find bugs as they use the applications. Our users want to use the software, not to find bugs and report them. FOSS projects in general and Ubuntu in particular need a new way of rethinking testing as a skilled activity and an opportunity to contribute to the project.

We want to build a Testing Team in Ubuntu to try to minimize the impact of bugs in the released versions. This team would have a mailing list and regular meetings on IRC. Activities will be diverse and will include things like: formal manual testing, exploratory testing, writing new test cases, organize and conduct community testing days, automated testing and developing new tools (yes, if you like to code, there’s also a place for you).

We would love you to join us and make it happen.

We are having a session at UDS Lucid to discuss this topic (scheduled for Wednesday). You can subscribe to the blueprint as well.

* This really deserve more than ‘twit’, so I am putting it here as NEWS.

We selected nearby no-nonsense, no-hype, no-big-fees kind of school running in somewhat 4 BHK kind of bungalow in residential area. He is in ‘Playgroup’ where primary motive is to interact with others, to learn by monkey business and to learn some good (hopefully) stuffs. I was glad that he did not cried while going to school, but we had to drag him to home and he cried a lot

Current school timings are 9.30 AM to 11.30 AM, so I must help K and need to wake up early in the morning and probably stop (or reduce) useless hacking till late night.

However, I’m kind of down due to RCT, Stomach issues and now some pain in shoulder – but still alive to write this.