Revisting Flock 2017

This report is retrospection of Flock 2017. This a long textual (zero-pictorial) post , so pardon me.

What is Flock?

Flock is an Annual conference Fedora community gathers. Flock 2017 was a more action-oriented event than previous years. This affects the types of session proposals that were accepted. The scheduled slots favor collaborative team working sessions and workshops over team status reports.


Flock happened in Hyannis,MA this time. It was  a pleasant weather.
Noteworthy to say that the event was well thought & planned. The participants had enough time for visa and other important stuff.

Kudos to the team behind for putting in immense amount of effort ranging from
registration to funding and from websites to executing it in such a great way! :)

Why was I there?

I proposed an session with my team (Fedora QA) on Kernel and Regression Testing. Most of us test the kernel on our lenovo but we hardly get the chance to test the new kernel on various off the shelf hardwares. Flock will be a good place where we will have many people
who will have different kinds of hardware and the aim of the do session will be to test if
everything works fine and or not. We also have a big spectrum of ARM devices and certified h/w most of which
can benefit from larger community involvement.Also , going forward we can have a kernel test day
as a part of the release which can help make fedora better.

It was a great pleasure to meet the community and attach a face to the IRC nicks I interact every now and then. This was my opportunity to meet my team Adamw, Tflink and Lukas and brainstorm ideas about some of the future projects in Fedora QA as well.

I would like to thanks Bex the most , for everything :)

What did I do?

Here are couple of things I did :

1. Every sponsored attendee was to AV and write about a session they attended and I being one, I attended couple of session and although I volunteered for AV rec of Tim Flinks session , but I kinda attended most of the session and took notes for the blog.

1.1 Adamw's Talk was on Automated package testing:
Focus of the talk was to learn about the automated test results.
A little bit background context for the talk was Taskotron and OpenQA are two major automation systems we use for testing Fedora.He talked about ResultsDB
and how Bodhi client-side calls for ResultsDB.Then he explained Tasks and showed us Taskotron/Tasks. Then he explained how dist-git works and walked us through some of the test cases namely dist.python-version and each of it's subsets.

Then he talked about OpenQA Tests in which he explained  how All crit-path updates are tested and how OpenQA has workstation and server workers. The types of failures Screenshot Mismatch and Commandline Failure.
Ending the talk with how openQA keeps the logs and artifacts for later triage.

1.2 Tim Flink gave a talk on upstream first testing which is a fairly new initiative where Red Hat is open-sourcing test cases so that they can be run first on Fedora. So that we can find bugs more easy and get fixed early.His talk was mostly QnA session where Tim answered questions about how its shaping and showed the progress.

1.3 I attended the magazine talk where Paul and Justin talked about what are the kind of topics that could be more apt for Fedora Magazine. After explaining the ground rules of "what kind of content" they were looking for , they opened the floor for ideas which they then up on Fedora Magazine Pitches and I pitched couple of topics one of them being Hawcukar for Data Monitoring. Sometime in coming months with F27 out of the door, I will complete it.

1.4 I attended Fedora Hubs introduction talk where Mo and Sayan talked about the platform in general and how its going to bridge the gap between finding the right people to work and solve the problem of onboarding new contributors. Kudos to the team and the effort!

1.5 I attended Trishna's talk on Custom Atomic Host OS tree , this was a small talk session where she walked us through how to build a custom OS tree and add the packages we want in Atomic Host.

1.6 I attended Laura's talk on Kernel. The kernel team was mostly looking for contributors to test the Kernel and in during my session we decided that we will have a test day which every release on the Kernel. As a result of Adamw's quick thinking and our contributors ,  we ran a Kernel Test Day for Fedora 27 Release.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2017-09-27_Kernel_4.13_Test_Day

2. I sat with Adamw and couple of others and decided on how to work with Fedora Modular Server and how we will be doing test days around it. 

Steps going forward!

1.Working more closely with different teams.
2.Finishing the committed Articles for Fedora Magazine


Special Mention:

People whom I traveled and enjoyed with (Kanika , Sinny). The QA team (Adamw, Tflink, Lukas). Mathew Miller , whose keynote session was awesome. Bex, who helped us more than words can express. David Duncan , volunteered for my AV. Sgallagh, for giving us an session with cheese and recording. Till Mass, my roomate. Justin , the guy who always inspired me!

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