A great way to contribute to Ubuntu is to ensure its functionality always works. What’s even better is that our infrastructure allows us to write tests once and continuously test if the tests still all pass, so whenever a package is updated or changed, we run the tests and can see if the functionality we rely on is still there and working perfectly.
This puts us into a situation where we all can contribute tests once and can basically monitor forever if the code still works. Personally I believe this to be one of the most efficient contributions you can make to Ubuntu (and to Open Source in general).
We want more people to use Open Source software and we all want more quality. We don’t want regressions, we don’t want subtle bugs which nobody ever got around to test. We don’t want anyone (least of all less technical people) to be surprised by bugs.
I hope you are excited about these possibilities as much as I am. If you are, I’d like to invite you to our Automated Testing Hackfest on Thursday, 13th December 2012. Many experts around Automated Testing are going to be hanging out in #ubuntu-quality, there are going to be demos, a lot of talk about automated testing infrastructure and tools and of course a lot of live-hacking!
There will be many more, but Jean-Baptiste and Martin already confirmed they’ll be around to help out and get us started! Be sure to join us in #ubuntu-quality on irc.freenode.net and check out the Automated Testing Hackfest page for some more info!