Virtual Hugs of appreciation!

Because I was asleep at the wheel (err, keyboard) yesterday I failed to express my appreciation for some folks. It's a day for hugging! And I missed it!

I gave everyone a shoutout on social media, but since planet looks best overrun with thank you posts, I shall blog it as well!

Thank you to:

David Planella for being the rock that has anchored the team.
Leo Arias for being super awesome and making testing what it is today on all the core apps.
Carla Sella for working tirelessly on many many different things in the years I've known her. She never gives up (even when I've tried too!), and has many successes to her name for that reason.
Nekhelesh Ramananthan for always being willing to let clock app be the guinea pig
Elfy, for rocking the manual tests project. Seriously awesome work. Everytime you use the tracker, just know elfy has been a part of making that testcase happen.
Jean-Baptiste Lallement and Martin Pitt for making some of my many wishes come true over the years with quality community efforts. Autopkgtest is but one of these.

And many more. Plus some I've forgotten. I can't give hugs to everyone, but I'm willing to try!

To everyone in the ubuntu community, thanks for making ubuntu the wonderful community it is!

Ubuntu Online Summit: Vivid Edition

Ubuntu Online Summit is once again upon us. This is a community event by and for the community. It's all encompassing and intends to cover a wide range of topics. You don't need to be a developer, project lead, member of a team, or even a member of ubuntu to join and participate. The only requirement is your passion for ubuntu and desire to discuss about it's future with others.

The dates are set as November 12-November 14th from 1400 UTC to 2000 UTC. I am once again privileged to be a track lead for the users track. In my opinion, this is the best track as it's the one the largest number of us within the community can easily feel a part of (just don't like Michael, David, Daniel or Alan know I said that). Do you use ubuntu? Awesome, this is the track for you.

What I'm asking for is sessions. Have an idea for a session? Please propose it! Everything you need to know about participating can be found here. If you've attended things like ubuntu open week or a classroom session in the past, all of those types of sessions are welcome and encouraged.

"The focus of the Users track is to highlight ways to get the most out of Ubuntu, on your laptop, your phone or your server. From detailed how-to sessions, to tips and tricks, and more, this track can provide something for everybody, regardless of skill level."

Regardless of your desire to contribute a session, I would encourage everyone to take a look at the schedule as it evolves and considering joining in sessions they find interesting. In addition, it's not yet too late to offer up ideas for sessions (though I would encourage you to find a way to host the session).

Ready to propose a session? Checkout this page and feel free to ping me or any track lead for help. Don't forget to register to attend and check out the currently scheduled sessions!

Autopilot Feature Primer

Autopilot celebrated it's 2 year anniversary as an independent project this summer. During that time it has developed into a useful tool for testing application UI's for gtk and qt toolkits. Support has also been extended to MIR as well as phablet devices.

With this in mind, I thought it would be useful to bring attention to some new and under-used features of autopilot, along with providing a brief explanation of some companion tools you might find useful. Thus I present to you, an autopilot primer. Let's talk through some new features shall we?

Python3 Support
Autopilot started as a python2 tool but has since migrated to python3 and you should too! For now the entire source tree remains python2 compatible, but you really should migrate your tests to python3. You'll notice the autopilot3 binary in newer releases which should be used to run autopilot with python3.

Scenario Support
Scenarios are a wonderful way to keep your tests simple and easy to read while allowing you to test with many different inputs. In short, you might need to test several edge cases as part of your acceptance testing. This is most easily accomplished by keeping the test itself generic and utilizing a scenario to vary your inputs. You can check out more information on scenarios specific to autopilot in the autopilot documentation.

Screenshots / Video
Autopilot allows you to get a video recording of a test failure. To make sure autopilot records failures, install recordmydesktop and pass the -r argument to your autopilot3 run command. However, at the moment this requires X so for now it doesn't work with the MIR backend (which things like the ubuntu phone utilize). Fortunately a screenshot at the point of failure when combined with the log is generally sufficient to solving your issue. Getting those screenshots brings us to subunit support.

Subunit Support
By default autopilot generates the test output and logs straight to your console in a text format. However autopilot also supports outputting to xml and subunit. Subunit support is what I would like to highlight for a few reasons. When you set the output format as subunit, you get a few niceties. One of which is an easier to grok format for tools, and the other is screenshots of the application when failures occur. To get a subunit stream, pass the -f subunit argument to your autopilot3 run command. You will want to also pass -O with a filename to save the output to a file as the subunit stream contains binary data.

Test Result Viewer
So, with this subunit test results file, how can you enjoy all of it's goodness? Enter trv, a simple python ui that will let organize the test run in an easy to view manner, including screenshots. The tool is the creation of Thomi Richards who describes it as a quick hack (:p), and has a youtube video demonstrating it's use. It's perfect for viewing the subunit stream and visualizing your test results. For now, it's not packaged but can be easily obtained via launchpad. Grab it with bzr branch lp:trv.

autopilot3 vis
The vis tool allows you to visually interact with the introspection tree after launching an application using autopilot launch. What this means is you can visualize the application in the same way autopilot does at runtime, with live tree updates. It lets you see what autopilot sees, allowing you to interactively build your testcase.

I'll refer you the official tutorial for more information, as well as a youtube video by yours truly. It's from a livestream, but covers what you need to know. autopilot3 vis also contains a search box, and a highlight tool which didn't exist in the orignal version, so it's even nicer now than before. Give it a whirl!

autopilot3-sandbox-run
I talked about this utility when I covered the test runners for autopilot. Still I would be remiss if I didn't mention it again. Everything I said in the test runners for autopilot post still applies, so go have a quick read about how to use the tool if you need more information. This tool enables you to easily run autopilot tests on the desktop in a nested xserver. What that means to you as a test author is that you can run tests without giving up your desktop session. No more waiting for autopilot to hand back control of your mouse after a test. If you are writing tests, you should be using this tool along with autopilot vis mentioned above during your test writing process.

Per test timeout
Although we all only write "good tests", sometimes you may find your test misbehaves. When this happens the test may even not exit cleanly or get stuck in a loop. The result is autopilot and the system under test to wait forever for the test to finish. To prevent a rouge test from killing a test suite run, autopilot is introducing support for per-test timeouts. This has landed in vivid; you'll need version 1.5.0+15.04.20141031-0ubuntu1 or later. To use the feature, add the --test-timeout argument to autopilot run and give is a timeout in seconds.

In conclusion
Autopilot has gotten many new features along the way, and these are but a few of the most recent and important ones. I hope this helps you take another look at what autopilot might be able to help you test. Happy Testing!