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January 23, 2006
Dapper Drake flight CD 3, part II
My first job in QA is volunteer work. Not exactly high value add stuff. I just went down the menus and tried to start all the apps. There were several that didn't work in this alpha version, so I logged bugs, a few of which ended up being duplicates.
It's a good way to learn a little bit about the packaging system, though mine attempts to find causes are mostly stabs in the dark. After one of the Ubuntu core dev guys, Sebastien, noticed a set of my bugs were all due to the same missing library for handling SVG images, I realized one of my others was probably just a missing dependency that didn't get flagged somehow. When I found the right package, the problem disappeared.
Somebody in marketing once talked about "unattended complexity." Rob and Luke had that on their whiteboard. Flagging dependencies brings those words to mind. We sometimes have people ask, "What's the minimum set of packages we need to install to run your software in production?" If you start doing anything very interesting, that becomes a hard question to answer.
Posted by Mark at January 23, 2006 09:17 PM
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