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

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Sivan Greenberg wrote:
> (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.
>   
Agree. You might also want to look at Accerciser which can record 
dogtail scripts but has a richer interface for exploring the AT-SPI data 
i the apps.

> 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.
>   
One interesting question is how do we deal with apps that have been 
patched differently by the two distros. One approach might be to have a 
core script upstream and just have some tiny imports for the 
differences. Python should make that easy.

> 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.
>   
Indeed and we can track tests with: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATracker

Henrik