[Mageia-dev] [changelog] [RPM] cauldron core/release kdenlive-0.8.2-1.mga2

Tue Nov 15 23:44:22 CET 2011

On Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:34:48 -0500, Juan Luis Baptiste <juancho at mageia.org> wrote:
+
+> I wrote about this some weeks ago but it went unnoticed[1], about a
+> cross-platform tool developed by OpenSuSE that is for doing all kind
+> of automated QA tests[2]. That tool looks very promising and helpful.
+> [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.mageia.devel/8661
+> [2] http://news.opensuse.org/2011/10/11/opensuse-announces-first-public-release-of-openqa/
+
+There was brief discussion about it on the qa discuss mailing
+list.
+
+I have experience with automated testing going back to the early 80's.
+This was on ibm mainframes, starting with Batch Terminal Simulator,
+and many others packages, often developed in-house.
+
+As soon as I saw that the testing scripts are using hashes of
+screen shots to determine if a test was successful, I cringed.
+You better not have a clock displayed, during the test.
+
+When you know *exactly* what the expected output will be, the
+tests can be automated.  Otherwise, you'll spend more time tweaking
+the test cases, rather then testing the updates.
+
+Where the qa team does have problems, or encounter delays, at
+present, there are two main reasons.
+
+Lack of hardware.  For example, mtd-utils is currently on hold
+pending testing by the person who requested the package, as no
+one on the qa team has an mtd flash device.
+
+Time and knowledge required to set up a test environment.  For
+example, in order to test gssftp from the krb5-appl-servers
+package, the qa tester has to set up and configure a kerberos
+server, with an appropriate backend such as ldap.
+
+There are only a few cases where repetitive testing is involved,
+where an automated procedure would be useful.
+
+Regards, Dave Hodgins
+