Friends in testing

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Introduction

The purpose of the Friends in Testing project is to perform and report short rounds of focused systematic and exploratory testing on the OLPC build candidate during the second half in each release cycle.

Participate

We'd love your help - please join us!

Participation in the Friends in Testing project is done one week at a time. You can start any time, and there's no obligation to continue after the week is over. This makes helping with Friends in Testing particularly suited to newcomers who are curious about testing but don't have a lot of time to spare for a first mini-project to attempt.

Who can participate

In order to participate, you must have an XO with a developer key that you are okay with completely wiping out and using as a test machine during your testing sprint (you will be able to restore your XO to its original state afterwards).

Potential risks

• Your XO's software may look and feel "weird." The new build you are testing may behave differently from what you're used to (that's the point - it's a new build). Before beginning to test, you can find out the build you're running (need link), and you can reinstall your original build afterwards (need link).
• Your Journal will be erased. However, you can back up (need link for backup) and restore (need link for restore) your Journal afterwards.
• Your Activities will be erased. However, as with your Journal, you can make a customization key with the Activities you want to keep, and restore your Activity set afterwards.
• You may brick your machine. We've made every effort possible to make sure that the builds that we release for Friends in Testing will not harm your XO, and to provide you with instructions on how to restore your XO to its pre-testing state, but there is a very slim chance that something might go awry and that you won't be able to restore your XO to its pre-testing state. It's never happened before to our knowledge, but we cannot guarantee it won't ever happen. We'll do our best to be honest with you each week about the risks you might be taking. We hope that, after reading this, you'll still want to participate; we do, however, want to make sure that if you're going to help us out, you know what you might be getting yourself into.

How to participate

Here's how to participate in a particular week's sprint.

1. Make sure you read and are okay with the #Potential risks.
2. Get a Developer key for your XO, if your XO does not already have one.

Finally, if you have questions about this effort, please leave them in Talk:Friends in testing or browse our other testing pages.

General notes for testing early releases

Caveats

This procedure asks you to install alpha software. You may lose all your data. Please back up personal files to another source if you would like to keep them.

Preparation

1. Get a developer key for your XO laptop
2. Backup your XO (optional -- you decide).
3. Clean-install or upgrade your XO to the test build.
   • If you clean-install, you will lose all your data.
4. Install activities with your favorite activity installation method.
5. Help test the OS and activities as described below.
6. Should you need them, recovery instructions are available.

Several other test preparation instructions are available, for example in OS images and in Emulating the XO, and other pages in Category:Preparing for testing.

Exploratory Testing

• Known issues are recorded in the release notes for a release; check both the current stable release's notes and/or the in-progress release notes for the development release you're testing.
• Sometimes people enumerate problems in Test group release notes.
• People report problems on the testing mailing list

You should report new issues in our bug-tracking system. You can also send any issues or comments to the development list, devel at lists.laptop.org.

Test 1: Wifi Testing

Can Current test image: 11.3.1 associate with your (encrypted?) access point?

If not, let us know!

Test 2: Explore the Smoke Test

Try out parts of the release's smoke test that appeal to you.

(Older tests are available.)

Systematic Testing

In addition to our freeform exploratory testing effort, we also engage in systematic testing efforts designed to achieve the test coverage necessary to make release decisions around future releases, much like past releases.

Systematic testing consists of several basic tasks:

• Reviewing a test plan.
• Writing the test cases, if needed.
• Executing the test cases and recording test results.
  • To record results on a particular test case page, click on the "Edit with form" button in the top of the page, and use the "Add Another" button just above the "Add New Results" section (i.e. at the bottom of the page).
• Contributing patches to the Tinderbox or Sugarbot automated testing platforms.

Test 1: Multiple Key Support

We are particularly interested, this week, in systematically testing OFW's new multiple key support.

Recovery

• If your machine becomes unbootable after a clean-install, you can recover by clean-installing an official build.
• If your machine becomes unbootable after an upgrade, you can recover by holding the 'O' gamepad key during your next boot.

Alternately, you could help test an even newer Joyride build!