If you’re looking for a way to contribute to Fedora, what about release validation testing? Completing test cases is a quick way to get started. Every release of Fedora that you download and use is tested by the Fedora QA team according to the Release Validation Test Plan. Each test compose of the Alpha, Beta, and Final Fedora releases is tested to see if it meets specific release criteria for that release. This post will walk you through the steps of getting set up, performing the release validation tests, and reporting them to the test matrix.

Get a FAS account

The first step required to help the release validation testing is to get a Fedora Account (FAS). Having a Fedora account allows you to post your results to the Fedora wiki automatically using the

relval

tool. If you don’t already have a FAS account, you can easily register for one here.

Setting up a virtual machine for testing

For each compose of a Fedora pre-release that should be tested, a page on the Fedora Wiki is created to help you find the ISOs to download, and the validation test cases to run. In this example, we are going to test the Fedora 24 Beta 1.1 compose. If you navigate to the Validation Testing wikipage for this compose, we are going to choose the

Fedora-KDE-Live-x86_64-24-20160424.n.0

(from the Fedora 24 Beta).

Once downloaded, it is recommended that you create a virtual machine (VM) to do your testing on. Easy ways to create virtual machines on Fedora include Boxes and

virt-manager

. The default configuration of a VM with 20GB hard drive space and 1024MB of RAM should be enough to execute the test cases.

Once your testing VM is created, you will need to install the

relval

tool to allow you to run the validation test cases, and report your results. To install

relval

, run the following command inside your test VM.

$ sudo dnf install python-wikitcms relval

Finding a test case and post the results

Now you are all set to begin testing. Let’s find a test case and explain the process. The test cases that should be run for a specific compose can be found on the same wiki page you found the link from to the ISO. In this example, we are going to pick the Mediakit ISO Size test case from the Image Sanity section. Each test case has a wiki page that explains in more detail what the test does, and how to run it:

The wiki page for the Mediakit ISO size test case lists the

relval

command to use for running the test and submitting the results.

$ relval size-check --username <your_FAS_Username>

After the test finishes, your screen should look similar to the below screenshot:

And the results will of your test will be automatically be posted in the result matrix.

Congratulations, you’ve now run your first test case for Fedora release validation testing! That’s how we perform test cases and submit results for release validation tests.

Getting more help

If you’re having issues or problems running test cases or need guidance using the tools, please visit #fedora-qa on the freenode IRC network or stop by the mailing list.