Since we’re now in the process of shaping up our Discourse for team communication, I think it’s the best time to talk about our own QA team tag: qa-team . I want to propose that we change it to #quality-team.
I have several reasons for that:
“QA” is not a well-understood term for many people. Many have to look up the abbreviation to understand what it means. On the other hand, “quality” is quite self-explanatory. When adding tags to a topic, people are much more likely to understand whether to add #quality-team than whether to add qa-team.
We already have a #quality:fedoraproject.org room on Matrix. Not #qa, but #quality. (Yes, it was me who asked for it on Matrix).
I think it would be a good idea to rename Fedora QA team to Fedora Quality team in the future, for the reasons above.
I have to admit I got inspired by the same change in Ubuntu: Ubuntu QA → Ubuntu Quality, to make the team more accessible.
I have no doubts at all that your team is a quality-team, but to me that means something different from QA
In that sense, I consider the matrix channel name to be unfortunate - and also because renaming things partially makes the landscape even more confusing.
QA is an industry standard abbreviation. In order to make it more accessible for “outsiders”, I’d suggest spelling it out completely. Unless you want to shy away secretly from making assurances
Thinking of spelling out - are there any tag descriptions which may pop up when you are about to select one?
Makes perfect sense to me, +1. I think the name quality-team is fine and much more understandable than qa-team. QA isn’t entirely “industry standard” any more (a lot of companies call it quality engineering these days, as RH does internally), and a lot of people involved in Fedora aren’t “in the industry”. We do get quite a few people showing up in the IRC channel thinking QA means “questions and answers”.
There’s nothing secret about it - I want to make it more clear that we, as testers, cannot and should not make any “assurances” when it comes to quality. The idea of “Quality Assurance” in software is a misnomer and I’d like to see the term go away. I’m a fan of QA as “Quality Assistance” but that struggles with what people assume QA means.
“You can’t test in quality” - it’s impossible to improve quality through testing alone. The people who have final control over the eventual quality of software are the people who control the time of the developers - if the developers are not going to fix issues found through testing, it doesn’t matter how much we test or how many issues we file. That being said, there is frequently a limit to the “quality” you can get without proper testing. Developers are developers and testers are testers - the jobs aren’t the same and you get the best results when people play towards their strengths.
As testers, we “hold a flashlight” to find and highlight issues. Ideally, we work with developers to get the issues fixed and by working together, the quality of the software that we all work on improves.
Long story short, I support the idea of changing “Fedora QA” to “Fedora Quality”
Regarding QA being an industry standard, as Adam noted, officially we work in QE - “quality engineering” in Red Hat. And my wife works in QC - “quality control”
@mattdm Can you please rename the tag (qa-team to #quality-team)? Thanks!
Also, can fedora-qa tag be incorporated somehow? E.g. All topics with fedora-qa tagged with #quality-team instead and fedora-qa then completely removed?
Done! Can you also please edit About the #quality-team tag to be what y’all want it to say? I’ve changed the ownership to @kparal, but made the post a wiki so anyone[1] should be able to update it.
I am +1 to this change. I have an addition to make, I think, in some cases, we might wanna have this go out as a commblog and annoucement for community to know. I would also like to see, if we can go ahead and say something like, Fedora Quality team (formerly known as Fedora QA) in the docs and wiki to let the community members not feel alienated.
The following needs updating as a result
Any wiki pages and Fedora docs where we used QA
Any test day and test cases templates
Heroes of Fedora Announcement templates
Fedora Cal which has QA in it
Fedora QA team meeting name to Quality and meetbot template as well…
Bugzilla reference of QA contact to Quality Contact.
Changeset and other program management docs where QA is cited.
Telegram channel
These are some places which come to my mind… maybe more as we go deep in making this change
Thanks! Would you know why that description doesn’t show up in an info bar on the right side at #quality-team topics , but it works fine e.g. for #silverblue-team topics ? It worked for the qa-team tag before.
I see. Would it then make sense to rename fedora-qa to #quality? So that we’d have quality-team for discussing team topics in Project Discussion and #quality when users complain about broken things in Ask in English . First, it would make the tags consistent between the categories, and second, using fedora-qa in Project Discussion feels like notifying a particular team (while it doesn’t), and #quality rather describes the area that the topic is about.
I’m afraid people would tag half their m posts “quality”, and especially the complainy ones.
The tag was supposed to be for end-user questions related to Fedora’s quality process and tools (see the few questions so tagged). Maybe the best thing to do is just move those here and remove that tag.
Yeah, that is true. I found there’s also problem (and bug which redirects to it), which feels sufficient to tag issues which we can then browse from time to time.
If that was the purpose of the tag, then yes, it would make sense to just get rid of it and let people raise those topics in Project Discussion .
I missed this thread and didn’t realize the name change is now official. It would be great to also see a Fedora Community Blog article about the change so we have a better opportunity to promote this in other contributor channels and social media.
Yeah… sorry for the delay. I was hoping to have the category-tag-mute feature from Discourse in place and do (one last[1]) big tag rename all at once. But that seems slower than I’d hoped, so I just went ahead with this one.
That’s my bad, I thought it was more-or-less official and asked about changing “Quality Assurance” to “Quality” or “Quality Team” on the fedora org chart.
I figured that if it wasn’t brought up now, while there’s attention on changing it, it might be a while before the chart was changed again.
