Hi all, I'm delurking with a vengeance here, I think :).
A few months ago I was invited to take an interest in the OLPC with specific regard to testing; I've been involved with Python and testing for a while, and someone asked Grig Gheorghiu and me to take a look at the OLPC work to see if we could help out with the QA process. For a variety of reasons (GHOP, and a baby, etc.) I didn't do much for a while, but I had submitted a talk proposal about my (fictitious) OLPC automated testing work to PyCon '08 and had to make good on the talk. So I finally put into action a bit of the stuff I'd been thinking about. If you want to skip the ranting and opinions you can go directly to my last blog post, here, http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/mar-08/peekaboo-and-screencasts.html where I show some screencasts of some simple Sugar GUI automation as well as instrumentation of the Sugar GUI with code coverage analysis using my 'figleaf' Python code coverage tool and 'peekaboo', a dynamic code tracing tool. The GUI automation was done with a simple twill-based domain specific language wrapping xmacro, and it's very fragile. But it does work. You're welcome to all of this code, although it needs some serious polishing. Note that I'm working with a student (Zach Riggle) to submit a "testing tools" GSoC application to the Python Software Foundation, with the aim of making robust GUI driving and trace recording tools for the OLPC (and other apps). Other than that, I'm interested in figuring out how to encourage the OLPC project to build some automated tests without doing it all myself :). Thoughts welcome. Basically I think it's incredibly important for the OLPC to invest in automated tests. --- OK, now for the ranting and opinions, which are less polite, I offer up the following posts (with one line summaries). The OLPC is crazy and needs to test; and its community interactions with Python are broken: http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/mar-08/pycon-08-thoughts.html My talk materials: http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/mar-08/pycon-08-materials.html Why I think automated testing is important, inspired by my OLPC experience: http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/mar-08/software-quality-death-spiral.html And the above screencasts etc.: http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/mar-08/peekaboo-and-screencasts.html As you can guess from the "death spiral" post, I'm not terribly interested in *debating* the usefulness of automated tests, and I don't buy into the notion that GUI automation is impossible, either. I would very much like to try to introduce systematic and robust GUI testing into the OLPC and I will be working towards that end as time and resources permit. Constructive comments and genuine interest are welcome! cheers, --titus ----------------------------- Dr. C. Titus Brown, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Asst Prof., Michigan State U. http://ged.cse.msu.edu/ _______________________________________________ Testing mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/testing
