Opportunity: Automated Installer Testing

I wanted to share a unique opportunity to get invovled with ubuntu and testing. Last cycle, as part of a datacenter shuffle, the automated installer testing that was occurring for ubuntu flavors stopped running. The images were being test automatically via a series of autopilot tests, written originally by the community (Thanks Dan et la!). These tests are vital in helping reduce the burden of manual testing required for images by running through the base manual test cases for each image automatically each day.

When it was noticed the tests didn't run this cycle, wxl from Lubuntu accordingly filed an RT to discover what happened. Unfortunately, it seems the CI team within Canonical can no longer run these tests. The good news however is that we as a community can run them ourselves instead.

To start exploring the idea of self-hosting and running the tests, I initially asked Daniel Chapman to take a look. Given the impending landing of dekko in the default ubuntu image, Daniel certainly has his hands full. As such Daniel Kessel has offered to help out and begun some initial investigations into the tests and server needs. A big thanks to Daniel and Daniel!

But they need your help! The autopilot tests for ubiquity have a few bugs that need solving. And a server and jenkins need to be setup, installed, and maintained. Finally, we need to think about reporting these results to places like the isotracker. For more information, you can read more about how to run the tests locally to give you a better idea of how they work.

The needed skillsets are diverse. Are you interested in helping make flavors better? Do you have some technical skills in writing tests, the web, python, or running a jenkins server? Or perhaps you are willing to learn? If so, please get in touch!