There has a been a lot of work going on regarding the stabilization of Factory. It is still ongoing process. We have a lot of submissions, Factory is moving really fast and was hard to keep stable. Over the time, there were more and more checks added to the process to make Factory more stable and usable in everyday life. Last of them being added right now are rings and openQA. You can learn more about that in the talk by our release manager coolo. It will also allow you a quick peek behind the curtain on what future will bring.
In that future, one of the core roles in making Factory stable will be played by openQA. As such it got quite some attention during openSUSE Conference 2014 in Dubrovnik. Stable Factory will not happen by itself, it need quite some work. Currently openQA is under heavy development to match the new needs. You can help improving it! The work is being coordinated in a progress.o.o project, the sources are available in a Github’s organization and there is even a talk to introduce you to the world of openQA development 😉
At some point, when openQA gets integrated well enough, users will be able to enjoy “almost” bug free Factory as a rolling distro. How bugfree it will be will depend on our test coverage of the distribution. What is the current state? We have basics pretty well covered, but still sometimes existing tests break and sometimes we miss more tests. If you want to help with making Factory better tested, you can get openQA running locally and start writing tests for stuff that matters to you! During a nice workshop in openSUSE Conference, Ludwig Nussel trained some geekos on how to get a local openQA running and start writing tests. Luckily, workshop was recorded so even if you missed the conference, you can watch it and start writing tests. New tests are welcome, although due to performance reasons (we want openQA to finish at some point, right?), not everything might get run every time. Even though, you can always run your own openQA instance for testing stuff that you care about and reporting to bugzilla!
Looks like there is a bright future in front of us with stable well tested Factory continually rolling forward. There is plenty of work to be done to achieve this, but progress made so far is starting to show results and we will approach the final goal faster as we get more people involved.
