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Latest news

Brian Murray

Spring Cleaning in Launchpad

May 1st, 2012 by Brian Murray

A short time ago I ran across a couple of bugs with the same title reported by the same Launchpad user something like:

package xyz failed to install/upgrade: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 139

Upon further investigation I discovered that those two bugs were duplicates but it made me wonder how many other Launchpad users had reported the same bug more than once.

I figured that the easiest way to query this information would be to use the Ultimate Debian Database, which also helpfully contains Ubuntu bug information. Using my local copy, I queried for Ubuntu bugs with the same title and reported by the same user about the same source package. The vast majority of these were package installation failures, some of which actually had consecutive bug numbers and others where the user just kept trying to upgrade over time without resolving the original issue.

I didn’t keep great stats but the quantity of apport-package bugs decreased by at least 175 when I got through marking duplicates.

Brian Murray

See the heat

March 26th, 2012 by Brian Murray

I find bug heat a useful way to determine the impact of a bug as it takes into account the number of duplicates, number of subscribers and quantity of people affected by the bug.  Additionally, as a defect analyst for a team that is interested in bug reports about a large number of packages, I’d like to be able find out which of our bugs (across all our packages) have the greatest heat in Launchpad. It would be helpful to see this data in a chart so I can visually distinguish differences in heat and also have the bugs grouped by package rather than having them in a list ordered only by bug heat. (The chart will also help because Launchpad times out when creating the report for the foundations-bugs team.)

To this end I’ve collected data on the five hottest bugs for each package to which my team is subscribed. I’ve used it to make following chart which only displays packages where the package’s hottest bug is greater than 10% of the hottest bug overall.

Foundations’s Hottest Bugs

The chart will display the bug number and title when you mouse over a point on it. It is also possible to control which of the five hottest bugs are shown. Again, I’ve created these for the desktop, server, foundations and ubuntu-x-swat teams. There are also charts for every package set in Precise.

Jean-Baptiste

Precise Beta 2 ISO Testing

March 23rd, 2012 by Jean-Baptiste

Precise Beta 2 is due next week (Mar. 29th) The first set of Beta 2 candidates is ready for smoke testing on the ISO tracker.

There are going to be more respins before we’ve got the final set but we’d appreciate any feedback we can get on these.

You can test on virtual machines, but at this stage, we’d need more tests on real hardware. If you can test on spare hardware or create a partition to install Precise Beta 2, it would be very appreciated.

As usual we’ll be asking everyone on the QA team to participate in the image testing to ensure we have good test coverage.

The procedures for testing ISO images and reporting results are explained on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/ISO/Procedures

You can download Precise images directly from cdimages.ubuntu.com with zsync or use dl-ubuntu-test-iso from ubuntu-qa-tools available from launchpad with bazaar:
$ bzr branch lp:ubuntu-qa-tools

Test results are tracked on http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/

You’ll need a Launchpad account to login on the tracker. Please register if you are new to this.

Let us know if you have any questions.

We will coordinate testing in #ubuntu-testing on freenode. Please, go there often to see what others are testing or what need to be tested.

Thank you very much for your help and happy testing!


Ara

A new UI for System Testing

March 23rd, 2012 by Ara

During the Precise cycle we have been working in building a new UI for System Testing, the desktop application to test your hardware with Ubuntu and report results to Launchpad and Ubuntu Friendly.

If you are running Precise, you can test the new UI searching the Dash for “System Testing”. The new UI is now feature complete and you can start using it to test your hardware and submit your results to Friendly.

Here you can find the differences between the old UI and the new one:

Old UI

 

New UI

I think it looks much better, doesn’t it? The most important thing is that it builds the grounds to be able to keep making improvements to the UI, which were blocked in many cases by the old one.

Now we need to a lot of testing to make sure it is fully working when 12.04 LTS gets released. So, if you are running Precise, I encourage you to give it a try and report as many bugs as possible.

To file bugs, run the following command in a terminal:

ubuntu-bug checkbox
Brian Murray

Confirming a bug task in Launchpad

March 9th, 2012 by Brian Murray

In the Ubuntu Bug Squad we frequently talk about how to perform tasks on IRC but for some people it is a lot easier to learn something by seeing it done. Subsequently, I’ve created a video of how to confirm a bug task in Launchpad. There are actually three different ways to do it and the best is the last one in the video.

I created the video mostly following the instructions at the Canonical design blog. I recorded separate screencasts for each way of confirming the task, that way they can be easily replaced if Launchpad changes. Text slides, instead of audio, were used to make production easier and also to allow for easy translations.