Measuring success/failure in the installation

[Zygmunt Krynicki]

W dniu 17.05.2011 12:44, Evan Dandrea pisze:
> While we have a set of unit tests and a continuous integration system doing
> system testing of the installer, we ultimately have no idea what the failure
> rate is in the real world.
>
> Without this information, we have no means of actually measuring the true
> quality of the installation experience.  It may look gorgeous and be
> dead-simple to use, but that's worthless if it's not leading to people using
> Ubuntu.
>
> I am therefore proposing that we actually measure this.  In Oneiric, I would
> like to add code to ubiquity that, once connected to the Internet, sends a
> GUID as generated by uuidgen.  At the end of installation it would send this
> again, and the pair of values in a database would constitute a successful
> installation.  Finally, it will send this value one last time, at first boot,
> to ensure that the system actually works.  From this point the GUID will be
> discarded and never used again.
>
> I will obviously make the code for this open source, and publish the results
> to a public-facing website.
>
> The user will be able to disable this functionality by preseeding a
> well-documented key. The documentation will include a brief visual overview of
> how to accomplish this, for those unaccustomed to preseeding the installer.
>
> This addition to the installer will keep us honest. With real data to hand, it
> will be very difficult to ignore the problem if ubiquity regresses in its
> failure rate from release to release.

Hi.

You might be interested to use some of the Linaro LAVA (advanced 
validation architecture) components to make your life easier.

In particular we supply the following pieces:

1) Well defined document for representing test results, including 
measurements within some hardware and software context.

2) A server side database that can consume such documents

3) Client side tools and python APIs to process and send documents to 
the server side component. Including libraries to probe the "context" 
form a running system (as in what hardware I'm running on and what 
software is installed)

If you wish to learn more feel free to join #linaro on irc.freenode.net 
and ping me (zyga) or Paul Larson (plars). The LAVA stack is spread 
around a few launchpad projects and is somewhat hard to find but we're 
working on consolidation and I would love to give you hints on how to 
get started.

Best regards
Zygmunt Krynicki