In general, links for specific ISOs for daily or milestone use can be found at the ISO Tracker. A link exists for the current development daily ISO. This can be useful, especially when setting up methods to download your testing ISO, such as with zsync

In addition to testing the images and software with predefined testing actions (static testing), community members can take part in exploratory testing as well.

In essence, exploratory testing means running the development release and doing your daily tasks with the system and finally, filing bugs when you find them. This allows Xubuntu to get a much larger spread of testing than is possible with predefined tests.

A useful way to deal with this is dual (or multiple) boots. By dual (or multiple) booting you can ensure you are able to access at all times a working version while testing the development system. In this way you can do as much work in the development release as is practical – all the while watching for bugs and regressions in the development release.

When dual (or multiple booting) it can be helpful to install the bootloader to specific partitions, a simple run-through on addressing this can be found at Manual Partitions and Bootloader location.

Issues which the development team are keen to address include, in addition to normally reported issues, usability bugs, missing icons, inconsistent functionality.

We have 3 PPAs which we use regularly to test packages. These are:

Installing from these PPAs means that you will be using and testing packages that developers are currently working with, this means that regressions found by you will not be present once they are released.

Removing an in use PPA. Using ppa-purge causes apt to disable a PPA source list and then change affected packages back to the default versions.

Reporting bugs with PPAs can be problematic, please see further information on reporting bugs with PPAs in Reporting bugs with PPAs.

Testing the development versions of Xubuntu and packages in it helps keep up the every day quality. If you have spare hardware resources or are able to run a virtualized testing environment, you can help.

Check the devel mailing list close to the start of the cycle, where the decision as to which testing week(s) we will participate in will be discussed.

During testing weeks the ISO will continue to build, the Xubuntu QA Team will watch the tracker reports and make testers aware of issues noted in previous days, notes will be made as appropriate pn the tracker QA Status page.

Fixed ISO testing will only take place for the Final Beta, during this milestone it is useful in the 2 days prior to release for the following to have taken place.

The importance of daily image testing lies mainly in knowing that boot and/or installation regressions haven’t appeared. Where it appears they have, if you are able to boot with a different flavours image, this can help prove a global or local to Xubuntu issue. If unsure contact the Xubuntu team, preferably on IRC.

About half way through any development cycle (around the beta milestones) we need to test upgrades from the previous release to the new development version. When the development version is intended to be the next LTS release, we need to test both upgrade paths: LTS to LTS and regular to LTS.

The ISO tracker has a section for upgrade tests which does not change daily, but runs from Friday to Friday. This enables us to test upgrades for a week rather than a day. During these tests it is preferred that the image used for testing is the one built on the first Friday, except where bugs are reported and fixes landed.

For releases where we are making use of the Package Tracker, calls for package testing will be made to the xubuntu-devel mailing list as required. This could be a call from QA or Developers.

A schedule of planned tests will be mailed to the Xubuntu Devel mailing list close to the cycle start. Reminders of upcoming package test requirements are mailed to the Xubuntu devel mailing list as required. Specific developer testing requirement are mailed as they are available, often these packages will be those found on one of our PPAs.