[coreboot] QA contribution

Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Sun Jan 30 12:16:04 CET 2011


Hi Danila,

I'd also like to say welcome, qa is definately something that
coreboot can benefit from.


Danila Sukharev wrote:
> As I see these docs are quite outdated... (about five years old)

Please do not assume outdated just because they are old. :) Some
details are outdated, e.g. the BIOS savior is partially not available
anymore, and partially it is not suitable for modern boards using SPI
flash, but I think the general principle of the testing
infrastructure is still sound.

Although it was developed several years I believe it can still serve
us well going forward. The function of coreboot has not really
changed, and probably will not change much, so the test tools might
also not need to change much. Note that I'm not saying that change is
resisted in any way here, quite the opposite, just looking back at
the years I've been involved in the project.


> Anyway I'll walk through them and try to understand where I'll be
> able to help you.

Great!

Personally I believe that development is what is missing to get
corebot testing going to a greater extent. As you will see in the
documentation there are fairly many requirements for an individual
mainboard to actually be hooked up to the test system. It's fully
automated once it runs, but it's too complicated to get there.

I think this needs to be optimized and to some degree productized,
into an easy to buy and fairly affordable (<100$) unit that can
administer testing of one or even better several mainboards. I have
plenty of design and implementation ideas if you'd like to go into
that.


> Another question -- what is the best way contacting the team with
> QA questions?

Please always use the mailing list.


> Who is coordinator/PM?

There's no manager. Contributors have equal possibilities to commit
source code. In discussions it comes naturally that more senior and
more active contributors in the project will have more insight to the
project, but other than that it's very much a group effort..

If there is a good reason of course efforts could be segmented, but
on the other hand contributors are a scarce resource which means that
segmentation is better avoided.


//Peter




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