History

QA SLE Functional - Team description

QSF (QA SLE Functional) is a virtual team focusing on QA of the "functional" domain of the SUSE SLE products. The virtual team is mainly comprised of members of SUSE QA SLE Nbg including members from SUSE QA SLE Prg. The SLE Departement page describes our QA responsibilities. We focus on our automatic tests running in openQA under the job groups "Functional" as well as "Autoyast" for the respective products, for example SLE 15 / Functional and SLE 15 / Autoyast. We back our automatic tests with exploratory manual tests, especially for the product milestone builds. Additionally we care about corresponding openSUSE openQA tests (see as well https://openqa.opensuse.org).

Test plan

When looking for coverage of certain components or use cases keep the openQA glossary in mind. It is important to understand that "tests in openQA" could be a scenario, for example a "textmode installation run", a combined multi-machine scenario, for example "a remote ssh based installation using X-forwarding", or a test module, for example "vim", which checks if the vim editor is correctly installed, provides correct rendering and basic functionality. You are welcome to contact any member of the team to ask for more clarification about this.

In detail the following areas are tested as part of "SLE functional":

  • different hardware setups (UEFI, acpi)
  • support for localization

QSF-y

  • Installation testing
  • RAID (levels 0, 1, 10, 5, 6)
  • USBinstall
  • allpatterns
  • autoyast (installer features, profile features, reinstall, tftp, …)
  • filesystems (btrfs, ext4, xfs; btrfs features: snapper, qgroups, balancing, send-receive)
  • lvm (+RAID, resize, full-encrypt, cryptlvm, activate existing)
  • dud_sdk
  • YaST configuration modules including services
  • default installation (gnome installation)
  • partition layouts (GPT)
  • medium checks (rescue system, mediacheck with integrity, memtest)
  • Addon, extension and module selection and registration (different repository sources)
  • Basic install and functionality tests of SLE modules, for example public cloud module, etc.
  • registration of installed system
  • minimal server installation
  • SMT (only installation)
  • remote installation (VNC, SSH, SSH+X-Forwarding)
  • PXE-Boot
  • different system roles (KVM, XEN)
  • installer self-update
  • installation system features (activation of existing volumes, hostname setting, SSH key import, etc.)
  • special network/disk devices (zfcp, nvme, multipath, iSCSI)
  • the SLE product "RT"

QSF-u

"Testing is the future, and the future starts with you"

  • basic operations (firefox, zypper, logout/reboot/shutdown)
  • boot_to_snapshot
  • functional application tests (kdump, gpg, ipv6, java, git, openssl, openvswitch, VNC)
  • NIS (server, client)
  • toolchain (development module)
  • systemd
  • "transactional-updates" as part of the corresponding SLE server role, not CaaSP

Explicitly not covered by QSF

  • quarterly updated media: Expected to be covered by Maintenance + QAM

What we do

We collected opinions, personal experiences and preferences starting with the following four topics: What are fun-tasks ("new tests", "collaborate", "do it right"), what parts are annoying ("old & sporadic issues"), what do we think is expected from qsf-u ("be quick", "keep stuff running", "assess quality") and what we should definitely keep doing to prevent stakeholders becoming disappointed ("build validation", "communication & support").

How we work on our backlog

  • no "due date" +1

    • we pick up tickets that have not been previously discussed
    • more flexible choice
    • more "blocked" tickets for
    • proposal: no global wip-limit -> 2 p.p. are too low? min 1? -> decision: global limit of 10 tickets "In Progress"
    • how to ensure to work on tickets which are more urgent?

  • SLAs for priority tickets

    • "taken": <1d: immediate -> looking daily
    • 2-3d: urgent
    • first goal is "urgency removal": <1d: immediate, 1w: urgent

  • our current "cycle time" is 1h - 1y (maximum, with interruptions)

How we like to choose our battles

We self-assessed our tasks on a scale from "administrative" to "creative" and found in the following descending order: daily test review (very "administrative"), ticket triaging, milestone validation, code review, create needles, infrastructure issues, fix and cleanup tests, find bugs while fixing failing tests, find bugs while designing new tests, new automated tests (very "creative"). Then we found we appreciate if our work has a fair share of both sides. Probably a good ratio is 60% creative plus 40% administrative tasks. Both types have their advantages and we should try to keep the healthy balance.

What "product(s)" do we (really) care about?

Brainstorming results:

  • openSUSE Krypton -> good example of something that we only remotely care about or not at all even though we see the connection point, e.g. test plasma changes early before they reach TW or Leap as operating systems we rely on or SLE+packagehub which SUSE does not receive direct revenue from but indirect benefit. Should be "community only", that includes members from QSF though
  • openQA -> (like OBS), helps to provide ROI for SUSE
  • SLE(S) (in development versions)
  • Tumbleweed
  • Leap, because we use it
  • SLES HA
  • SLE migration
  • os-autoinst-distri-opensuse+backend+needles

From this list strictly no "product" gives us direct revenue however most likely SLE(S) (as well as SLES HA and SLE migration) are good examples of direct connection to revenue (based on SLE subscriptions). Conducting a poll in the team has revealed that 3 persons see "SLE(S)" as our main product and 3 see "os-autoinst-distri-opensuse+backend+needles" as the main product. We mainly agreed that however we can not own a product like "SLE" because that product is mainly not under our control.

Visualizing "cost of testing" vs. "risk of business impact" showed that both metrics have an inverse dependency, e.g. on a range from "upstream source code" over "package self-tests", "openSUSE Factory staging", "Tumbleweed", "SLE" we consider SLE to have the highest business risk attached and therefore defines our priority however testing at upstream source level is considered most effective to prevent higher cost of bugs or issues. Our conclusion is that we must ensure that the high-risk SLE base has its quality assured while supporting a quality assurance process as early as possible in the development process. package self-tests as well as the openQA staging tests are seen as a useful approach in that direction as well as "domain specfic specialist QA engineers" working closely together with according in-house development parties.

Documentation

This documentation should only be interesting for the team QA SLE functional. If you find that some of the following topics are interesting for other people, please extract those topics to another wiki section.

QA SLE functional Dashboards

In room 3.2.15 from Nuremberg office are two dedicated laptops each with a monitor attached showing a selected overview of openQA test resuls with important builds from SLE and openSUSE.
Such laptops are configured with a root account with the default password for production machines. First point of contact: slindomansilla.suse.com, (okurz@suse.de)[mailto:okurz@suse.de]

  • ''dashboard-osd-3215.suse.de'': Showing current view of openqa.suse.de filtered for some job group results, e.g. "Functional"
  • ''dashboard-o3-3215.suse.de'': Showing current view of openqa.opensuse.org filtered for some job group results which we took responsibility to review and are mostly interested in

dashboard-osd-3215

  • OS: openSUSE Tumbleweed
  • Services: ssh, mosh, vnc, x2x
  • Users: ** root ** dashboard
  • VNC: vncviewer dashboard-osd-3215
  • X2X: ssh -XC dashboard@dashboard-osd-3215 x2x -west -to :0.0 ** (attaches the dashboard monitor as an extra display to the left of your screens. Then move the mouse over and the attached X11 server will capture mouse and keyboard)

Content of /home/dashboard/.xinitrc

#
# Source common code shared between the
# X session and X init scripts
#
. /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.common

xset -dpms
xset s off
xset s noblank
[...]
#
# Add your own lines here...
#
$HOME/bin/osd_dashboard &

Content of /home/dashboard/bin/osd_dashboard

#!/bin/bash

DISPLAY=:0 unclutter &

DISPLAY=:0 xset -dpms
DISPLAY=:0 xset s off
DISPLAY=:0 xset s noblank

url="${url:-"https://openqa.suse.de/?group=SLE+15+%2F+%28Functional%7CAutoyast%29&default_expanded=1&limit_builds=3&time_limit_days=14&show_tags=1&fullscreen=1#"}"
for i in `seq 1 10`; do
  zoom=$zoom"-e ZoomIn "
done
DISPLAY=:0 midori -e Fullscreen -e Navigationbar $zoom -a "$url"

Cron job:

Min     H       DoM     Mo      DoW     Command
*   *   *   *   *   /home/dashboard/bin/reload_midori

Content of /home/dashboard/bin/reload_midori

#!/bin/bash

DISPLAY=:0 xset -dpms
DISPLAY=:0 xset s off
DISPLAY=:0 xset s noblank

DISPLAY=:0 xdotool search --onlyvisible --any midori windowactivate --sync key F5

Issues:

  • ''When the screen shows a different part of the web page'' ** a simple mouse scroll through vnc or x2x may suffice.
  • ''When the builds displayed are freeze without showing a new build, it usually means that midori, the browser displaying the info on the screen, crashed.'' ** you can try to restart midori this way: *** ps aux | grep midori *** kill $pid *** /home/dashboard/bin/osd_dashboard ** If this also doesn't work, restart the machine.