There are many posts everywhere which invites you to participate in a test day, of course I have also written some in past. But this is about a real experience when you put your efforts in testing every bit of a component. Today it was a Jenkins test day and I did my best to test this beautiful open-source continuous integration tool. Here I share my experience in detail.

I had a Fedora 21 virtual machine 3.16.1-301.fc21.x86_64, which was not updated with latest alpha release. I faced some weird issues, while doing yum update. I took help of Kamil to update my system, thanks to him. Without wasting more time, I directly jumped to test day wiki page :: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2014-09-30_Jenkins . This is a real bliss if you keep an eye on FedoraQA Calendar. This was the source of information for me today. you can’t miss anything if you occasionally look at it. So yeah, coming back to test day..I configured my test VM with yum update given in test page.

But it yelled back saying that “Madam, first install then update!”. I mean, clearly, I did not have these packages by default. I have installed all these listed packages with yum install. I love yum for pulling all dependencies itself. Now next step was to execute all listed test cases one by one with an evil intention that I should break it somehow and manage to log lots of bugs 😛 . But true, when you start things with wrong intentions, chances are good that you fall back. I could not access my Jenkins instance at http://localhost:8080 for a half an hour. Thank God, we have IRC#fedora-test-day. Thanks to people there who suggested number of things. Generally, when you have a test day for a component, you can find developer, testers, users on #fedora-test-day on free node and they all are there to help out. So, it is really easy dude!

Solution that worked for me was simple, first I needed to turn my iptables (firewall) off then I cleared by browser cache and bingo, I got my Jenkins instance page loaded. I could see a man with curved mustache, closed eyes, a red bow and a big smile on his face,i.e. on top right corner of my screen. Jenkins uncle was smiling.

That was time to start some real testing. I tested whole bunch of test cases given on test day page. As expected, I faced few failures but overall it worked pretty nicely. Big thanks to msrb. He was really helpful. He organized test day first time but he made everything in place. Success of a test day depends on its organizer too. He publicized it well, he created test page very user friendly. Test cases were written so nicely and he was available on IRC though out the day and helping for every query. Well Done sir 🙂

Finally, I have updated test page with my testing results. I have logged 3 bugs and mentioned them in test results section of test page. It is really simple to log one, you need to do following ::

Ask on #fedora-test-day if the issue you are facing is actually bug or if that is not already logged in. Sample ::

amita> msrb, for test case 6

<amita> any one faced java.io.IOException: Plugin installation failed. No manifest at /var/lib/jenkins/plugins/jenkins-icon-shim.jpi/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

<amita> mizdebsk, ^^

<msrb> amita, yes, it’s a known bug in jenkins-icon-shim pkg: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1147821

<amita> oh ok

<msrb> it should be really a problem

If it is valid one and then go to Red Hat Bugzilla and open a new bug against right component and version. Sample ::

<amita> msrb, I am facing http://fpaste.org/137753/82125141/ for slave configuration

<amita> do we need jenkins rpms installed on slave machine too?

<amita> or is it a bug? msrb

<amita> known bug?

<msrb> amita, nope, that shouldn’t be necessary. it’s probably a bug. could you please report it in bugzilla?

<amita> sure

<msrb> thanks, good job!

<amita> msrb, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1147978

Don’t forget to put all bugs in test results section of test day page. Sample ::

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2014-09-30_Jenkins#Test_Results

So all in all it was a win win for me and Jenkins pkg owners. I learned about Jenkin and they have got some bugs to fix now 🙂 It is really a big satisfaction to learn something new while doing your favorite job i.e. testing. Some one rightly said that learning something new often keep you feeling young. So if you now want to stay young, keep testing, participate more, enjoy test days, report bugs and don’t forget to update test results 🙂