Quality assurance is the final stage of testing a distro release, where you boot a real OS image, and use the keyboard and mouse to navigate the system. Several distributions have adopted openQA and os-autoinst which can automate much of this work, allowing QA testing to happen every time a package updates, instead of just at release time.

Increased downstream testing is great for upstreams, but for developers to work efficiently, we need quick feedback between publishing a change and discovering what broke. In many cases we still don't get issue reports upstream until weeks or months after a merge request landed.

What's missing? Let's look at the remaining pain points around QA in the Linux OS world. Then we’ll look at research happening in the GNOME project to bring QA testing all the way to the merge request pipelines in GNOME Gitlab, so we can find integration issues as they happen.

We’ll also touch on how systemd-sysext allows testing built artifacts in an OS in a distro-independent way. And we’ll look at how changes in openQA could mean that QA teams in different companies can join forces to build testsuites once, instead of everyone working separately to maintain their own.