LTS Test Drive Program

What is the LTS Test Drive program?

The LTS Test Drive program is a program where we invite you to find bugs in the latest release on the 2.x line. You will receive $500 for each accepted high severity issue and $250 for low severity issues.

If you are interested, please sign up with the form on the right. If you are interested to learn more, scroll down to gain more information about the LTS Test Drive Program.

All bug reports need to be submitted by December 2nd at the latest to recieve compensation.

LTS Test Drive Program Guidelines

Thanks for expressing interest in the Device OS LTS test Drive Program, we are excited that you've chosen to help us find reliability issues for our forthcoming LTS release. To help get the most of your time, we are asking that participants comply with a few important guidelines related to submission of bugs.

What are Long Term Support (LTS) releases?

Long Term Support (LTS) releases for Device OS are independent branches of Device OS that are feature-frozen in time. They do not receive updates with new features, API changes, or improvements that change the function or standard behavior of the device.

LTS releases are subject to a higher degree of testing and scrutiny than standard Device OS releases on our master branch. In order to drive more adoption of release candidates, we are establishing a test drive program, with a goal to have enhanced user testing.

We hope you sign up for the LTS test drive program because we deeply value your expertise.

Bug Report Guidelines

  1. A bug report must be submitted via a typeform response (which we will send to you once you sign up), and that report must include the following:

Summary of problem in terms of how observed behavior goes against expectations. Link to relevant documentation that sets expectations if possible. If documentation does not exist, please state your expectations clearly. 2. Clear steps to reproduce the problem must be described that can be re-executed against a Particle Dev Kit. Additionally, the following are required:

  • device type: For example, "Boron LTE"
  • device id: For example, "2c0032000a47363339343638"
  • RF signal strength: For cellular devices, be sure to refresh the device vitals reported by the Particle Console device details page (i.e. a page like https://console.particle.io/devices/). Additionally, please click "Download History" to retrieve a CSV of other detailed information about the device's operating environment that may help to reproduce your bug report. Ideally your cellular signal is 42% or higher; bug reports less than this are less likely to receive compensation due to inability to reproduce a poor RF environment. The bug submission form will contain a "Cellular Signal" field and a "Vitals CSV" where you can provide these important technical details as part of your bug report.

Image from iOS (2)

  1. A minimal application firmware should be provided that, when used in concert with the reproduction steps, will allow a QA engineer to observe the same bug characteristics you reported. Your firmware should not require special hardware peripherals. Instead firmware should emulate, mock out, or simplify interactions with the peripheral to demonstrate the bug.

Compensation Guidelines

Bug reports that can be reproduced internally at Particle using your bug report and are deemed a bug (rather than a feature request) will result in a cash reward. The amount will be determined by whether the issue is labeled as high severity or low severity. The labeling of severity against reported bugs occurs via a weekly Production Triage process with stakeholders from Customer Success, Product, and Engineering. You will receive $500 for each accepted high severity issue and $250 for low severity issues.

You will hear back within 3 weeks of submission whether your bug was accepted or not. For those that accepted, you will receive follow-up instructions on how to go about receiving payment.

High Severity Bug Bounties

To get you started, here are some areas of the platform where we'd love your help finding bugs. These are more likely to be compensated.

  • Over the Air Firmware Updates (OTA): Especially updates that upgrade from one recent device-os version to another such as 1.5.4 to 2.0 rc2 or 2.0 rc1 to 2.0 rc2.
  • Cloud connectivity: Situations where the signal strength and quality is high, but the device still struggles to stay connected to the Particle Cloud.
  • Cellular connectivity: Situations where the cellular modem is not behaving as expected in the given RF environment. Focus on interactions with the modem over mobile operator conditions/specifics/towers. Local mobile operator issues should NOT be filed as bugs and instead be filed as tech support requests.
  • Device OS crashes: Situations where Device OS crashes or is unavailable for routine operations in an unexpected way.
  • Bricked devices: A permanent failure mode where Device OS crashes and will not boot up again even after power cycling the device.
  • API calls causing race conditions: Situations with multi-threaded mode on where interactions with Device OS system APIs cause the system to lockup or behave in erratic, unexpected ways.

Low Severity Bug Bounties

Conversely, here are a few areas where we are less interested in bug reports. These are less likely to receive bug report compensation.

  • Application specific issues: Please avoid reporting bugs where significant application complexity is obfuscating whether this is a bug in your application or a bug in Device OS. For example, suppose your application makes some advanced modifications in the typical network setup and you think you have found a bug in Device OS. In this situation, when supplying a minimal firmware with your bug report, exclude the code that modifies the network setup.
  • Bugs occurring in poor RF signal/quality environments: It is known that the platform behaves less reliable in poor RF environments. Thus, we're restricting the scope of bug report compensation to our classification of fair connectivity or better. For LTE, when RSRP is -112 dBm or greater and when RSRQ is -13 dBm or greater. We may still consider them if the bug boundaries are close or the nature of the bug isn't impacted by RF conditions.
  • Wi-Fi devices: While we are interested in bug reports for Wi-Fi devices, we are much more interested in bug reports for cellular devices.

Local cellular mobile operator issues should be filed as support requests rather than LTS bug reports. If they turn out to be modem/firmware related and a bug comes from it, please reference the ticket number so we can associate them. Cloud side bugs in Console, Build, or other tools: This program is focussed on Device OS LTS release, though we appreciate bug reports for other aspects of the platform, they are unlikely to be financially compensated.

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Based on the Google Individual Contributor License Agreement, v1.1

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