Hellen Chemtai: Starting out on Open source: Try the OpenQA Debian Image Testing Project

Hello world . I am an intern at Outreachy and contributing to the Debian Images Testing project since October 2025. This project is Open Source and everyone can contribute to it in any way. The project uses Open QA to automatically install Operating System Images and test them . We have a community here of contributors that is always ready to help out. The mentors and project maintainers are very open to contributions. They listen to any innovative ideas and point out what they have been doing so far.

So far contributions have been in terms of:

• Documentation – Adding to install guides
• Pseudo Tests – Suggesting an idea after finding an error or idea
• Pointing out bugs / errors when trying out tests
• Work on tests
• Contribute towards the wider community / help out other contributors
• Heck, you can even create a screen-cast video doing the set up and add it to the guide / docs
• Developers with further understanding can try to work with the maintainers on packages

Contributing to this project requires some knowledge of Linux commands and Operating Systems. What we will learn later as we go on will be :

• Images / Operating System Installation through dual booting
• More Linux commands
• Images / Operating System Installation and testing on Virtual Machine
• Git commands
• Writing testing documentation
• Writing Pseudo Tests
• Writing test modules / code using Perl
• Working on configuration

Before any contribution begins, we would want to first try out the project and run a couple of tests. Get to understand what we are doing first. Let’s say you are starting out as a Windows or MacOS user and you want to start contributing. I would recommend dual partitioning your device first. Do enough research and prepare the resources. The network install image just needs at-least 4 GB USB flash drive for dual booting. You will use Debian as the second operating system. Give enough space to Debian, I recommend around 150 GB or more. Also assign at-least 1 GB space to the /boot/efi directory to prevent the low space warnings after a while.This will be a way good way to learn about image installation which is part of the work . I do not recommend Virtual Box because it will hinder full use of system resources. This process will take a day or two.

After dual booting. We log into our Debian System . The next step of instructions will take you through how we set up and run our tests. These instructions have many Linux commands. You will be learning if you are a newbie as you go through the steps. Try to understand these commands and do not blindly copy and paste. You can start your contributions here if you have a suggestion to add to the install docs. Run some tests then log in the Web UI as per the instructions to view your tests progress. Green means they’ve passed. Blue means its still running. Red means failed.

Kudos if you have reached this point. The community of contributors will help if you are stuck. We get to try out our own variations of tests using variables. We will also rely on documentation to understand the configurations / test commands like these

openqa-cli api -X POST isos ISO=debian-13.1.0-amd64-netinst.iso DISTRI=debian VERSION=stable FLAVOR=netinst-iso ARCH=x86_64 BUILD=1310 #This is the test you will run on the guide

openqa-cli api -X POST isos ISO=debian-13.1.0-amd64-netinst.iso DISTRI=debian VERSION=stable FLAVOR=netinst-iso ARCH=x86_64 BUILD=1310 TEST=cinnamon #I have added a TEST variable that runs only cinnamon test suite

You can check specific test suites from the WebUI :

We get some failures at times. Here are some failed tests from a build I was working on.

Here we find the cinnamon test failed at locale module. Click on any module above and it will lead us to needles and point to the where the test failed. You can check the error or try to add a needle if its needle failure.

Try editing a test module and test your changes. Try out some ideas. Read the documentation folder and write some pseudo code. Interact with the community. Try working on some tasks from the community . Create your tests and add them to the configuration. There is a lot of stuff that can you can work on in this community.

It may seem hard to grasp at first as a newbie to Open Source. The community will help you through out even if the problem seems small. We are very friendly and the code maintainers have extensive knowledge. Get to sit with us during one of our meetings and you will learn so much about the project. Learning , networking and communicating is part of contributing to the broader community.