Up until the start of the 17.04 cycle the Xubuntu Quality Assurance team had been led by one person. During the last cycle, a break was needed by that person. The recent addition of Dave Pearson to the team meant we were in a position to call on someone else to lead the team.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Dave will be carrying on as a team lead. However, starting with the artfully named Artful Aardvark cycle, we will migrate to a Quality Assurance team with two leads who will be sharing duties during development cycles.

While Dave was in control of the show during 17.04, Kev was spending more time upstream with Xfce, involving himself in testing GTK3 ports with Simon. The QA team plans to continue this split roughly from this point; Dave will be running the daily Xubuntu QA and Kev will focus more on the QA for Xfce. For the most part it is unlikely that much change will be seen by most, given that for the most part we’re quiet during a cycle (QA team notes: even if the majority of -dev mailing list posts come from us…) – other than shouting when things need you all to join in.

While it is obvious to most that there are deep connections between Xubuntu and Xfce, we hope that this change will bring more targetted testing of the new GTK3 Xfce packages. You will start to see more calls for testing of packages before they reach Xubuntu on the Xubuntu development mailing list. Case in point, the recent requests for people to test Thunar and patches direct from the Xfce Git repositories – though up until now this has come via Launchpad bug reports.

On a positive note this change has solely been possible by the creation of the Xubuntu QA Launchpad team some cycles ago. Specifically set up to allow people from the community to be brought in to the Xubuntu setup and from there become members of the Xubuntu team itself. People do get noticed on the tracker and they do get noticed on our IRC channels. Our hope is that we are able to increase the numbers of people in Xubuntu QA from the few we currently have. Increasing numbers of people involved, help us increase the quality and strength of the team directly.