“Quality has always been an important value in the Ubuntu
community, but over the last few releases we have faced some
challenges in how we can assure and deliver quality.Over the last year quality has become a strong area of focus
inside Canonical. This has included re-factoring the roles and
responsibilities of QA staff (focusing them on defect analysis as
opposed to just bug triage), Pete Graner has been leading an effort
to get an extensive automated testing infrastructure in place,
Jason Warner has led an effort to put acceptance criteria in place
for Canonical upstreams (this requires that a certain level of
quality is assured before Unity updates are landed in the
development branch of Ubuntu), and I have hired Nicholas Skaggs who
starts in January to build out our QA community, with a particular
focus on manual testing and triage.