Volunteers needed -- Automated Image Testing for flavors

[Nicholas Skaggs]

Greetings everyone! I wanted to share some news about a renewed effort 
to restore automated installer testing of ubiquity using the daily 
images generated by cdimage. Up until last cycle, the images were being 
test automatically via a series of autopilot tests, written originally 
by the community (kudos to you Dan!). It was noticed the tests didn't 
run this cycle, and wxl accordingly filed an RT; 
https://rt.ubuntu.com/Ticket/Display.html?id=26570. In short, as part of 
some datacenter shuffling, we learned it's no longer possible for CI to 
run or maintain the tests. They recommended we host and run them 
ourselves as a community.

With the directions from CI in hand, I initially asked DanChapman and 
dkessel to investigate setting up a jenkins to run these tests. But they 
need your help! The autopilot tests for ubiquity have a few bugs that 
need solving. You can see them here: 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bugs?field.tag=autopilot.

To help solve these bugs or to learn more, check out this document: 
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-installer/ubiquity/trunk/view/head:/autopilot/README.md. 
It will guide you through running the tests yourself locally. You should 
be able to replicate the tests following those instructions. From there, 
patches and comments on the bugs would be most welcome (as would 
additional bug reports should you find them).

Even with the tests working, however, we still need to setup a jenkins 
to run them. We'll also need to maintain this server. Anyone with 
experience or desire in this area? Ideas for reporting results (on the 
isotracker for instance) also need to be explored. This is likely to 
involve some python, and potentially some web work. Is anyone interested?

If you have some technical skills and want to help out, please do get in 
touch with myself, DanChapman or dkessel. The goal behind this effort is 
to see these tests be useful again this cycle for image testing and 
lowering the burden for manual testers.

Thanks!

Nicholas