Autopilot: what's next for this cyle?

[Nicholas Skaggs]

There's been several folks pinging me about autopilot, wanting to get 
involved and learn about using the tool, etc. So, now that vUDS is over, 
Iwanted to bring everyone up to speed on what we did last cycle and the 
plans for moving forward.

So first, a tiny bit of history. The autopilot project 
(https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-autopilot-tests) was founded last cycle 
after we as a team discovered the tool and started writing some tests 
using it. Our initial goals were twofold:

Automate iso testing installation via ubiquity
Write a set of automated tests for every default desktop application in 
ubuntu

So to quickly give a status on both those fronts, we struggled with 
getting autopilot and ubiquity to work well together. As such, we left 
it sit until we could get more help from the developers of each project. 
At a recent sprint, I roped in thomi and xnox and we were able to get a 
proof of concept working. Fingers crossed, we should be able to 
implement automated image tests for our current manual iso testcases 
(yay!) this cycle. I'm waiting to hear back from xnox to make sure the 
code has landed in ubiquity so we can start on this :-)

The second effort is to have a set of automated tests for the default 
desktop applications in ubuntu. These tests are contained in the current 
bzr branch. We had various stages of success and issues with 
autopilot-gtk throughout the course of the cycle. I'm happy to report 
that we have some help on this from 2 fronts moving forward. The first 
is autopilot 1.3 landed, which should make it easier for us to write 
testcases. It removed the sometimes unity-specific nature of the tool. 
The second is that pitti, and the upstream QA team within canonical are 
now going to maintain autopilot-gtk and help us with any roadblocks 
we've encountered while trying to write the tests. This should hopefully 
mean we can complete some of those testcases that we just couldn't get 
to work correctly.

So, moving forward I'd like to kickstart the efforts again by examing 
our documentation for autopilot test writing 
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/ContributingTestcases/Autopilot), 
cleaning up the repository, and scheduling a 
hackfesthttps://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Hackfest in order to get together 
and start hacking on some of these testcases :-) If your interested in 
helping out, please feel free to dive into the code, have a look at 
autopilot and get cracking. I'll send a seperate email to help us pick a 
date for the hackfest (which will be about contributing all types of 
testcases to ubuntu of course!).

Feel free to ping with questions or help on the mailing list as usual.

Happy Hacking,

Nicholas
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