[Was Re: Linux Desktop Testing Project] "Go and Play For QA" or Ubuntu Desktop Testing

[Sivan Greenberg]

(Sending this to ubuntu-devel to keep all interested parties in the
loop. This comes out of my personal correspondence with Will Woods of
RedHat/Fedora testing team)

As it seems collaborating and integrating on the run/test/report/stat
frameworks can be deferred to a later stage once we have a larger base
of desktop tests to share. This will also let some time onto the the two
frameworks Ubuntu and Fedora uses to mature so we'd be in a better stage
to integrate. However, I don't see why we cannot start
right away on collecting , developing and establishing our desktop apps
test base in dogtail.

I'd like to re-use any dogtail or other desktop testing framework tests
written by members of the upstream community (not sure how many of them
already exist, but we'll see) so what we need to do:

1) Decided which is our desktop app base that we are going to "support"
testing-wise, maybe in here there will be place to sync up between the
two distros. A nice side-effect of this could be the creation of a
FD.org standard "Which apps need to be in a free desktop OS?". For
Ubuntu that will probably be easy as we have the "Desktop Seed" in
place. Not sure how this works for Fedora. I will discuss this with Will
Woods.

2) Having the list created in (1) we should inquire respective upstreams
to see what they have for testing the desktop app they are responsible
to. I'd like to explore the option of converting tests from other open
source frameworks if existing to dogtail, as dogtail provides us common
ground of the python language for the test scripts and seems easiest to
maintain and adopt.

3) Fill in the gap (which would probably the the bulk of work) between
what we can re-use and what we need to write from scratch. I'm currently
checking with the fedora folks to see how far they have reached in
developing desktop tests using the dogtail framework. To ease the burden
on this, we should encourage distro's community members (upstreams
should be approached gently as they probably already are very busy) "Go
and Play For QA" with the applications they like best, knowing that way
they dramatically contribute to the quality of their most used or liked
application. As dogtail allows "recording" of tests, we could probably
devise an  easy enough workflow for creating tests that could be carried
on by new contributors who wish to become active in the community. Those
"first sketch" tests could be then fixed/improved by a person or a team
out of  the QA team if not already suitable for integration into the
automated testing setup. Being a very low barrier for entry and quick
enough way to getting involved and recognized, I envisage we could
assemble a team to carry on this "preliminary" test development.

4) Integrate tests into pkg testing mechanism (of choice).


Sivan