Parch

Testing & QA

Parch has no dedicated QA team: quality comes from conventions every contributor follows. This section turns those conventions into concrete, reusable test plans.

Testing applications

Unit, integration, GUI, accessibility, and localization testing for apps.

Testing packages

The package test plan: build, install, upgrade, remove, and dependency validation.

Testing ISOs

The ISO release test plan: boot, installer, post-install, and hardware.

CI/CD

GitHub Actions as Parch uses it: ISO builds per release and app CI.

Performance & hardware

Boot time, resource budgets, and real-hardware compatibility passes.

The three canonical test plans

Everything else is a variation of three plans. Copy them into your PR description and tick the boxes:

  1. Application plan

    Build from clean checkout, unit tests pass, launch on Wayland, exercise the primary flow, keyboard-only pass, dark theme, Persian locale, then package it and repeat after pacman -U.

  2. Package plan

    Clean chroot build, namcap clean, install/upgrade/remove cycle, file list review, dependency check (ldd for binaries), desktop file validation. Detail in testing packages.

  3. ISO plan

    Build from the profile, boot in QEMU (BIOS and UEFI), installer run with auto and manual partitioning, post-install boot and update, then one real-hardware pass before release. Detail in testing ISOs.

Principles

  • Test on a system that looks like a user's: current packages, one desktop, real fonts. A pristine build machine hides integration bugs.
  • Write down what you tested. Untested claims do not count; the PR description is the test report.
  • Automate the boring parts (builds, linting, boot smoke tests) and spend human attention on the parts that need judgment (UX, RTL, installer edge cases).
  • Regressions get tests. Every bug that ships once should be caught automatically the second time.

Continue in Testing & QA

Testing applicationsUnit, integration, GUI, accessibility, and localization testing for Parch apps.Testing packagesThe package test plan: build, install, upgrade, remove, dependency validation.Testing ISOsThe ISO release test plan: boot, installer, post-install, and hardware.CI/CDGitHub Actions as Parch uses it: ISO builds per release and app CI patterns.Performance & hardwareBoot time, resource budgets, and real-hardware compatibility passes.