A few weeks ago I wrote about my new role as an upstream QA engineer. I have now officially been in that role since June. Quite expectedly I had (and still have) some backlog from my previous Desktop engineer role, but I have had plenty of time to work on automatic tests and some test technology now. If you are interested in the daily details, you can look at the ramblings on my G+ page; in a nutshell I worked on integration tests for udisks2 (mostly upstream now), a mock polkit API, and a small enhancement of the scsi_debug kernel module. On the distro QA side I got the integration tests of udisks2, upower, PostgreSQL, Apport, and ubuntu-drivers-common working and added to our Jenkins autopkgtest runner, where they are executed whenever the particular package or any of its dependencies get updated. This already uncovered a surprising number of actual bugs, so I’m happy that this system starts being useful after the initial hump of getting the tests to run properly in that environment.

In that previous blog post I mentioned that Canonical will hire a second person for an upstream QA engineer role. I am pleased that the job posting is now online, so if you are familiar with how the Linux plumbing and desktop stacks work, are frantic about testing, like to work with the Linux, plumbing, GNOME, and other FOSS communities, know your way around jhbuild, Jenkins, and similar technologies, and would like to explore new possibilities like applying static code checking or creating APIs to fake hardware, please have a look at the role description! Please feel free to contact me on IRC (pitti on Freenode) or by email if you have further questions about the role.