Package Based Tests

[Joshua Powers]

Greetings,

With another LTS less than a year away I felt it was a good time to
look at what the state of automated quality and testing looked like in
Ubuntu Server. Personally when I am preparing an upload I have a much
higher degree of confidence when I see dep8 or other tests. As such
seeing what the overall landscape of automated testing in server
packages was of great interest.

As I mentioned in a previous email [1] I took a look at all 521 of the
“server-team” packages [2] to determine the presence of dep8 tests and
also expanded my search to cover packages with a testsuite defined in
the Debian control file, golang tests, or python tests. Obviously this
is far from perfect. The quick check does not cover other language
specific tests, makefiles that may execute tests, or packages with
heavy upstream testing. However, it does give a general idea of what
package testing is present.

The results [3] indicated that 149 (29%) packages had no detected
tests. A wishlist bug was filed for each of these packages indicating
the absence of automated tests. [4] The desire is to look through the
list and identify packages, which would strongly benefit from the
addition of package based testing and determine what contributions
could be made. The bugs also represent an opportunity to the broader
community to contribute to Ubuntu.

Thanks!

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-server/2017-March/007516.html
[2] http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/package-team-mapping.json
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/dep8
[4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.tag=needs-dep8&orderby=targetname&start=0 

-- 
Joshua Powers
Ubuntu Server
Canonical Ltd