QA/Testopia Evaluation

Summary

The Fedora QA team is interested in evaluating Testopia as a test planning and results recording solution.

Background

During the Fedora9 campaign, the fedora wiki was used to planning, recording and presenting test execution status. Examples can be found:

• Fedora 9 Installation Test Plan
  • Alpha
  • Beta
  • Preview Release
  • RC

• Additional test results recorded for:
  • Swfdec (rawhide)
  • PackageKit (rawhide)
  • LiveCD (FinalRelease)

While the information gathered was very helpful, and in the case of swfdec, was used to support dropping the proposed feature from F9, manually editing the wiki was not optimal. Additionally, tracking which test cases to include in a particular test run was easy to mis-type. Manually adding results to a wiki-style table entry was also easy to mis-type.

Pro's

• Recorded test cases provided manual steps needed for execution and verification
• The test plan outlined a plan of attack and provided a prioritization and organization for the proposed test cases
• Wiki worked well for test plan and case content
• Low barrier to entry ... a wiki is straight forward and uncomplex

Con's

• Gather alternative views of test metrics from the wiki is not possible
• Wiki not so great for hard metrics (date, tester, pass/fail execution metrics)

Tasks

STATUS	OWNER(s)	TASK
DEFERRED		Create testopia.fedorahosted.org site (trac, tickets, git, mailing list etc...)
COMPLETE	User:dmalcolm	Rough packaging of testopia so that we can install and test on publictest2
INPROGRESS	User:dmalcolm, User:jstanley	Package review for testopia RPM See bug#450013
COMPLETE	User:jkeating	Apply for fedora infrastructure sponsorship. Jesse has volunteered to be our sponsor
COMPLETE	User:dmalcolm	Apply for shared "publictest environment" to house proof of concept Available at https://publictest2.fedoraproject.org/bugzilla
INPROGRESS	User:jlaska	Migrate existing F9 data into testopia for sample data set See Testopia Plan#2
COMPLETE	User:dmalcolm	Craft a client script for communicating to testopia via XMLRPC using mozilla cookies for authentication (see QA/Testopia/XmlRpc

Open issues

REPORTER	ISSUE
User:jlaska	Testopia Component list Should the testopia instance just re-use bugzilla product and components? 2008-06-16 update: User:jstanley has updated the components on private testopia instance to use output from the pkgdb (see https://palladium.jds2001.org/bugzilla/)
User:jlaska	Attaching bugs Testopia supports linking bugs to a test run. It appears to be looking in the current db for bugs, does it support looking into another bugzilla db for a valid bug#? While in the future our bugzilla and testpia would be one ... presently they are note. Perhaps an upstream patch is in order to support alternative bug repos (or perhaps a URL) in that field?
User:jlaska	Searching Searching for test plans/cases/builds/results is somewhat odd in Testopia. Unless you're logged in, you can't peruse the information. The posted pdf documentation outlines how to use the quick search field, but this seems odd. There appears to be no advanced search page? For example, how can I search for test cases matching a specific component? Or, show me all test runs against the Beta build SOLVED - the Search link in the Testopia footer takes you to a Testopia specific search page. I haven't yet figured out who to save searches and pass them around via a url ...
User:alindebe	Must be logged in for viewing We'd like our content to be read-only for all users ... login should not be required.

Lessons Learned

The following list outlines important issues uncovered during the testopia proof of concept:

FUDCon Boston 2008 Hackfest

TODO:

Litmus test: provide link -> do something productive without getting lost

 - You will need to create an account.  This is still a prototype; do not reuse a valuable password for this.
    - TODO: Non-fatal error when creating account:
    - Get yourself added to the Testers group (wwoods can do this; who else?)

 - HOWTO: installation testing: how to report results?
 - HOWTO: write a test plan/case for one of your packages

 - wording of announcement:
     - to fedora-test-list?  devel-list?  announce-list?     
 - database backup
 - git repo for scripts
 - some docs on the wiki (screencast)
 - disable bug entry
 - some nice css so it doesn't look like bugzilla, and hack up as necessary
 - have f10 testcases ready to go
 - XML-RPC to create each day's rawhide as a "build"
 - BarCamp talk: who to give?  what to say? etc
 ???? etc
 - profit!!!