Communicating effectively with the QA Community

[Nicholas Skaggs]

Hello everyone! Recently I know many of you have had a rocky August with 
the changes landing in quantal. On top of this, the testing needs this 
cycle have never been greater with lots of requests for testing and 
milestones occurring. To complicate matters further, changes landed in 
quantal that caused many of you grief -- and for the most part without 
warning. Indeed, this issue has occurred as well during iso-testing 
events with confusion occurring on when and what we are testing.

First, I wanted everyone to know I consider this critical to the future 
success of our team and indeed the greater ubuntu community. I've 
undertaken the steps to start the conversation, but this will be a 
process with bumps along the way. To start the conversation, I 
approached the topic with the release team during there weekly meeting. 
The release team coordinates all ubuntu releases, and helps oversee the 
milestone testing events as well as the changes that go into the archive 
after feature freeze. I then followed up with a discussion on the 
ubuntu-release mailing list. You can find my reply here:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-release/2012-August/001817.html

I summarized what I believe was a typical experience for some of you. 
Namely, the issues with the removal of unity2d and the xorg changes 
meant you couldn't test in a VM or on your real hardware. And further, 
you didn't know of this was going to occur, and maybe even spent time 
troubleshooting your setup to no avail. This is a failure to adequately 
communicate what was happening in development.

So what can be done? Is there good news? Indeed there is! I have both a 
shorter-term and a longer-term idea for tackling this communication 
issue. I'd love your hear your ideas as well! Please do share! In 
addition, I hope to continue to shape the overall development process to 
make the qa community play a more central role. That dream cannot be 
realized without the excellent work and support from you all.

As to the short term idea, in general I try to get wind of impactful 
changes and share them with all of you. I think perhaps this could be 
made into a more official bit of news with information coming out on 
pending changes at regular intervals. This will require some changes 
with ensuring I can get more information to digest and share, but I 
think it's a good idea that we can implement right now.

The longer term idea is to pursue a technical solution that could run on 
your development desktop. The information would be the same, simply 
delivered to you instead of you needing to go find it :-) The idea is 
still very early; I have no spec, though I share a few more details in 
the post above. If your interested in helping make this happen, please 
do get in touch with me.

So in closing, I want you to know I consider this issue of extreme 
importance. I am sorry for the bad experiences you may have had, and I 
want to do everything I can to prevent them in the future. You can help 
by thinking critically about how we as a team communicate and what we 
can do to give you and everyone else testing a better experience.

Thank you, and as always /*Happy*/! Testing.

Nicholas
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