A Testing Core Team IRC meeting to discuss 11.4 Milestone 3 was held November 15.

We first discussed the latest developments in automated testing of installation. If those system builds that will not install are detected early, then users will be spared the effort wasted in downloading a product that will not run. The goal is to minimize user frustration, and maximize user time spent in tests that cannot be done automatically. For example, the virtual machines used in the automatic testing have very limited hardware, thus a lot of drivers are not tested.

Team member Bernhard Wiedemann, who developed these testing procedures, has been granted access to a server at openSUSE for this purpose. For anyone interested in the details of how the tests function, please see https://lwn.net/Articles/414413/. To see the squashing of bugs over time, see http://openqa.opensuse.org/cgi-bin/currentresults. The links in the left-hand columns show details of the testing. To see visually what Bernhard is testing, look at the movie.

The meeting also discussed the handling of Bugzilla reports. The plan is to automate the scanning of the list to find those bugs that affect the pending release so that none of bugs found in testing are allowed to persist in the released version. Further discussion of bug handling will be reported here.