Isoken Ibizugbe: Beginning My Outreachy Journey With Debian

Hello, my name is Isoken, I’m a software engineer and product manager from Nigeria. I am excited and grateful to begin this journey as an Outreachy intern working on the project “Debian Images Testing with OpenQA”. 

I am particularly drawn to helping solve problems for people; it keeps bugging me till I can find a way to help. This interest in problem-solving and improving quality is what drew me to this project.

OpenQA is an automated test tool that simulates a user’s interaction by looking at the screen and sending actions like mouse clicks and keyboard inputs. It takes screenshots and compares the image to known reference images to verify if the system is behaving correctly.

During the contribution phase (which was 4 weeks), I got to know about Debian software, it’s different mode of installation and available different desktop environments, at first I felt intimidated as most of it was new to me, but the setup material and docs for the project made it easy for me, the fact that it looked like a gradual process, getting to know the program, registering the steps in mind and then take notes of every step and visuals, writing it in a way another developer would understand (this is called detail level 3), and then translate it to test code level 1.

I contributed to improving the installation documents and a detail level 3 doc for a bug report on the system locale being incorrect. This strengthened my documentation skills and ability to adjust to the writing style of the project.

I also started working on app start-stop tests for two desktop environments. I was able to explore, check the applications, and note their differences and similarities. It was really interesting to me; this was where I started writing on coding level 1, and my tests started passing. I will spend the next few weeks continuing on it and hopefully creating a way to synergize the tests and make it easy to maintain later on.

I am also grateful for the assistance from other candidates during the contribution stage and the privilege of having the mentors, Tassia Camoes Araujo and Roland Clobus, and Philip Hands, to guide and correct me through the internship period. I will share my progress regularly here on the blog. You can follow the progress of the work here on the main repo. 

Wish me luck on the rest of this journey