Consider this text your giant disclaimer. Just a reminder these images are not intended for end-users; please don't go flashing your device thinking you'll have a replacement for android. These images are intended for developers, enthusiasts and testers who want to help. If this describes you, please read on!

I'm happy to announce the ubuntu touch images are now available for testing on the isotracker. And further, the images are now raring based! As such, the ubuntu touch team is asking for folks to try out the new images on there devices and ensure they are no regressions or other issues.

I wanted to post briefly about the work that has been going on at the end of the cycle in the ubuntu quality team. Yes, we're testing the final images! Yes, it's been a wild ride that is nearing the finish! Yes, you can help contribute results! (And as we'll see below, you can help write tools too!)

But more than all of that, several team members have stepped out of there comfort zones and went to work on one of the testing tools we as a team utilize. The tool is called "Testdrive" and is written in python. Now, one of the great things I love to espouse on about with QA is the opportunity to work on many different things. There are needs to fit all interests, and if you are willing, the capability to learn.

In this instance, there is an opportunity to learn a little python and to work with a new team to help keep a testing tool alive. I'm happy to see that the same tool that was rendered broken in January by updates is now alive and well, with brand new contributors, fresh patches and even a release! Many thanks to smartboyhw, noskcaj, SergioMeneses, phillw, and the others who have reached out to ensure the tool that ships in raring still works. Thanks as well to the testdrive development team for engaging with us, reviewing merge proposals, and helping to ensure testdrive still works.

I look forward to a bright feature of new and improved testing tools. Specifically to those who contributed patches, with your new coding abilities, I can't wait to see what will happen next cycle! *wink, wink*

The quality team invites you to a testing event for the final beta iso images. We'll be providing real-time help (IRC, or even one on one video hangouts if needed), encouraging you to download the final beta images, install, upgrade and test them out with us. You only need yourself, a machine (virtual or real!) and a bit of willingness to learn. We'll even be broadcasting for part of the event on ubuntuonair. So here's the details you need to know:

Tuesday April 2nd, 2013

• 1800 UTC - 2200 UTC 
• Quality team members are dedicated to hanging out in #ubuntu-quality executing testcases and helping answer questions
•  2000 UTC: 
• We'll be streaming live on ubuntuonair doing live testing demos and offering help
• Basic iso test install
• More exotic examples -- netboot, server, non-english
• Your requests!

I just pushed out a new python-dbusmock release 0.6.

Calling a method on the mock now emits a MethodCalled signal on the org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock interface. In some cases this is easier to track than parsing the mock’s log or using GetMethodCalls. Thanks to Lars Uebernickel for this.

DBusMockObject.AddTemplate() and DBusTestCase.spawn_server_template() can now load local templates from your own project by specifying a path to a *.py file as template name. Thanks to Lucas De Marchi for this feature.

I also wrote a quite comprehensive template for systemd’s logind. It stubs out the power management functionality as well as user/seat/session objects, and is convincing enough for loginctl. Some bits like AttachDevice is missing, as this sounds unlikely to be required for D-BUS mock tests, but please let me know if you need anything else.

The mock processes now terminate automatically if their connected D-BUS goes down, as advertised in the documentation.

You can get the new tarball from Launchpad, and I uploaded it to Debian experimental now.

Enjoy!

As discussed and planned, Smart Scopes have landed! Unity 7 too is landing, with many more features around getting 100 scopes installed, privacy, and dash improvements. For details on what Unity 7 is bringing, check out this post.

In support of the Unity changes, the Unity development team is asking for some extra testing on these specific features. So, we've updated and added a new testcase to our unity suite for these smart scopes. Pay attention to the cases marked mandatory and optional. The testcases relating to the smart scopes have all been marked as mandatory, and are the essential tests to run. That said, it doesn't hurt to run through the optional cases if you have time. We don't like regressions either :-)

So, here's what you need to know!

Never done a call for testing before? Read/Watch this first!; Call for testing walkthrough

Install the new unity from a ppa; Installation Instructions
 
Load the testcases and select one; Unity 7 Testing

Read the testcase, perform the actions listed and record your results.

If you run into any issues, please file a bug

Finally, please note the changelogs and build status found on the tracker, as well as any known bugs while testing. New builds will continue to trickle in over the next few days with new changes coming in. I'd encourage you to test and then re-test later in the week to follow-up on bugs you find, or test the new things that land.

As always please contact me if you run into issues, or have a question.
Thank you in advance for your help, and happy testing everyone!

I wanted to write a post about the excitement of the new platform and the wonderful new challenges we face ahead of us. Now, given that this platform is being written right now from the ground up, those with a nose for quality instantly perk up. We love well tested applications, and developing with tests in mind from the start is much easier than attempting to retrofit. Seeing the first fruits of the developer effort is very exciting -- good work everyone!

So with that in mind, I started looking at some of the excellent work the core apps teams are doing with there applications. They've been working with the design community to turn the nice mockups into reality. I took the liberty of checking out and running some of the first versions of these applications. The calculator is one that stood out to me as already closing in on its specification. So armed with some of the design conversation for the calculator, I started a branch to create a set of manual tests for ubuntu touch applications, starting with the calculator. If you are interested in quality, now is the time to be involved! The applications can all be installed and run on your phone or even a ubuntu desktop.

So what can you do?

If you're a tester;

• Install the core apps from ppa:ubuntu-touch-coreapps-drivers/daily
• Run the applications, take a look at the designs, and start putting together some testcases
• Push your testcases up to the manual test repository
• As the applications mature in functionality, help test by participating in the calls for testing and cadence weeks for the platform.

I'm helping!

A number of times over the past few years I’ve needed to create some quite complex migrations (both schema and data) in a few of the Django apps that I help out with at Canonical. And like any TDD fanboy, I cry at the thought of deploying code that I’ve just tested by running it a few times with my own sample data (or writing code without first setting failing tests demoing the expected outcome).

This migration test case helper has enabled me to develop migrations test first:

class MigrationTestCase(TransactionTestCase):
    """A Test case for testing migrations."""

    # These must be defined by subclasses.
    start_migration = None
    dest_migration = None
    django_application = None

    def setUp(self):
        super(MigrationTestCase, self).setUp()
        migrations = Migrations(self.django_application)
        self.start_orm = migrations[self.start_migration].orm()
        self.dest_orm = migrations[self.dest_migration].orm()

        # Ensure the migration history is up-to-date with a fake migration.
        # The other option would be to use the south setting for these tests
        # so that the migrations are used to setup the test db.
        call_command('migrate', self.django_application, fake=True,
                     verbosity=0)
        # Then migrate back to the start migration.
        call_command('migrate', self.django_application, self.start_migration,
                     verbosity=0)

    def tearDown(self):
        # Leave the db in the final state so that the test runner doesn't
        # error when truncating the database.
        call_command('migrate', self.django_application, verbosity=0)

    def migrate_to_dest(self):
        call_command('migrate', self.django_application, self.dest_migration,
                     verbosity=0)
 

It’s not perfect – schema tests in particular end up being quite complicated as you need to ensure you’re working with the correct orm model when creating your test data – and you can’t use the normal factories to create your test data. But it does enable you to write migration tests like:

class MyMigrationTestCase(MigrationTestCase):

    start_migration = '0022_previous_migration'
    dest_migration = '0024_data_migration_after_0023_which_would_be_schema_changes'
    django_application = 'myapp'

    def test_schema_and_data_updated(self):
        # Test setup code

        self.migrate_to_dest()

        # Assertions

which keeps me happy. When I wrote that I couldn’t find any other suggestions out there for testing migrations. A quick search now turns up one idea from André (data-migrations only),  but nothing else substantial. Let me know if you’ve seen something similar or a way to improve testing of migrations.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s big 0.2 release, I pushed out umockdev 0.2.1 with a couple of bug fixes:

• umockdev-wrapper: Use exec to avoid keeping the shell process around and make killing the subprogram from outside work properly.
• Fix building with automake 1.12, thanks Peter Hutterer.
• Support opening several netlink sockets (i. e. udev monitors) at the same time.
• Fix building with older kernels which don’t have the EVIOCGMTSLOTS ioctl yet.

This fixes the “bind: address already in use” errors that were popping up in X.org and upower when running under umockdev, and finally gets us working packages for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (in the daily-builds PPA).

I just released umockdev 0.2.

The big new feature of this release is support for evdev ioctls. I. e. you can now record what e. g. X.org is doing to touchpads, touch screens, etc.:

  $ umockdev-record /dev/input/event15 > /tmp/touchpad.umockdev
  # umockdev-record -i /tmp/touchpad.ioctl /dev/input/event15 -- Xorg -logfile /dev/null

and load that back into a testbed with X.org using the dummy driver:

  cat <<EOF > xorg-dummy.conf
  Section "Device"
        Identifier "test"
        Driver "dummy"
  EndSection
  EOF

  $ umockdev-run -l /tmp/touchpad.umockdev -i /dev/input/event15=/tmp/touchpad.ioctl -- \
       Xorg -config xorg-dummy.conf -logfile /tmp/X.log :5

Then e. g. DISPLAY=:5 xinput will recognize the simulated device. Note that Xvfb won’t work as that does not use udev for device discovery, but only adds the XTest virtual devices and nothing else, so you need to use the real X.org with the dummy driver to run this as a normal user.

This enables easier debugging of new kinds of input devices, as well as writing tests for handling multiple touchscreens/monitors, integration tests of Wacom devices, and so on.

This release now also works with older automakes and Vala 0.16, so that you can use this from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The daily PPA now also has packages for that.

Attention: This version does not work any more with recorded ioctl files from version 0.1.

More detailled list of changes:

• umockdev-run: Fix running of child program to keep stdin.
• preload: Fix resolution of “/dev” and “/sys”
• ioctl_tree: Fix endless loop when the first encountered ioctl was unknown
• preload: Support opening a /dev node multiple times for ioctl emulation (issue #3)
• Fix parallel build (issue #2)
• Support xz compressed ioctl files in umockdev_testbed_load_ioctl().
• Add example umockdev and ioctl files for a gphoto camera and an MTP capable mobile phone.
• Fix building with automake 1.11.3 and Vala 0.16.
• Generalize ioctl recording and emulation for ioctls with simple structs, i. e. no pointer fields. This makes it much easier to add more ioctls in the future.
• Store return values of ioctls in records, as they are not always 0 (like EVIOCGBIT)
• Add support for ioctl ranges (like EVIOCGABS) and ioctls with variable length (like EVIOCGBIT).
• Add all reading evdev ioctls, for recording and mocking input devices like touch pads, touch screens, or keyboards. (issue #1)

Ubuntu Global Jam is just a few short weeks away. I trust you've seen the posts announcing and asking you to plan your events. Maybe you are confused about what type of session to plan or how the event could go. I will echo my friend Daniel Holbach in saying just do it! Grab a buddy (even an online one!) and plan to jam together. If your confused about what to jam with, check out the testing page.

It's got everything you need to run a session, and the documentation has all been done for you. Folks can choose what they are interested in testing (packages, images, or hardware), or even do some hacking on testcases. No need to be a programmer, manual tests can be written by anyone! Participants don't need anything besides there laptop and an image of ubuntu on a cd or usb stick (assuming of course they aren't already running ubuntu raring :-) ).

If your curious about wanting to host a testing event, checkout the testing page on the global jam site. Feel free to get in touch with me as well if you wish to share your stories or ask questions. Let's jam, quality style!

The quality team has completed a series of classroom sessions held over the last two months. None of these would have been possible without the help from these wonderful instructors:

phillw, gema, noskcaj, smartboyhw, primes2h, letozaf, sergiomeneses

Thank you!

Thank you as well to pleia2, JoseeAntonioR and the other classroom team members who helped us schedule and run the sessions.

You all rock!

A couple posts ago, I mentioned the ubuntu quality team was looking for people to join the team and help out in the testing efforts we undertake. Thanks to those of you who've already answered the call and our now joining our testing ranks. We love sharing the joys of testing with others!

We're serious about wanting to make sure you are able to contribute and join the community as easily as possible. So for the last couple months, as a team we've been writing tutorials, giving classroom sessions, and hosting testing events. We really do want you as part of the team. Check out some of the resources available to you and consider becoming a part of the team!

Classroom Sessions
Video Tutorials
Written Walkthroughs

• Contributing Cadence Testing results
• Contributing Image Testing results
• Contributing Call for Testing results
• Setting up Launchpad
• Contributing Manual Tests
• Contributing Autopkg Tests
• Contributing Autopilot Tests

What is this?

umockdev is a set of tools and a library to mock hardware devices for programs that handle Linux hardware devices. It also provides tools to record the properties and behaviour of particular devices, and to run a program or test suite under a test bed with the previously recorded devices loaded.

This allows developers of software like gphoto or libmtp to receive these records in bug reports and recreate the problem on their system without having access to the affected hardware, as well as writing regression tests for those that do not need any particular privileges and thus are capable of running in standard make check.

After working on it for several weeks and lots of rumbling on G+, it’s now useful and documented enough for the first release 0.1!

Component overview

umockdev consists of the following parts:

• The umockdev-record program generates text dumps (conventionally called *.umockdev) of some specified, or all of the system’s devices and their sysfs attributes and udev properties. It can also record ioctls that a particular program sends and receives to/from a device, and store them into a text file (conventionally called *.ioctl).
• The libumockdev library provides the UMockdevTestbed GObject class which builds sysfs and /dev testbeds, provides API to generate devices, attributes, properties, and uevents on the fly, and can load *.umockdev and *.ioctl records into them. It provides VAPI and GI bindings, so you can use it from C, Vala, and any programming language that supports introspection. This is the API that you should use for writing regression tests. You can find the API documentation in docs/reference in the source directory.
• The libumockdev-preload library intercepts access to /sys, /dev/, the kernel’s netlink socket (for uevents) and ioctl() and re-routes them into the sandbox built by libumockdev. You don’t interface with this library directly, instead you need to run your test suite or other program that uses libumockdev through the umockdev-wrapper program.
• The umockdev-run program builds a sandbox using libumockdev, can load *.umockdev and *.ioctl files into it, and run a program in that sandbox. I. e. it is a CLI interface to libumockdev, which is useful in the “debug a failure with a particular device” use case if you get the text dumps from a bug report. This automatically takes care of using the preload library, i. e. you don’t need umockdev-wrapper with this. You cannot use this program if you need to simulate uevents or change attributes/properties on the fly; for those you need to use libumockdev directly.

Example: Record and replay PtP/MTP USB devices

So how do you use umockdev? For the “debug a problem” use case you usually don’t want to write a program that uses libumockdev, but just use the command line tools. Let’s capture some runs from libmtp tools, and replay them in a mock environment:

• Connect your digital camera, mobile phone, or other device which supports PtP or MTP, and locate it in lsusb. For example

    Bus 001 Device 012: ID 0fce:0166 Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro

• Dump the sysfs device and udev properties:

    $ umockdev-record /dev/bus/usb/001/012 > mobile.umockdev

• Now record the dynamic behaviour (i. e. usbfs ioctls) of various operations. You can store multiple different operations in the same file, which will share the common communication between them. For example:

    $ umockdev-record --ioctl mobile.ioctl /dev/bus/usb/001/012 mtp-detect
    $ umockdev-record --ioctl mobile.ioctl /dev/bus/usb/001/012 mtp-emptyfolders

• Now you can disconnect your device, and run the same operations in a mocked testbed. Please note that /dev/bus/usb/001/012 merely echoes what is in mobile.umockdev and it is independent of what is actually in the real /dev directory. You can rename that device in the generated *.umockdev files and on the command line.

    $ umockdev-run --load mobile.umockdev --ioctl /dev/bus/usb/001/012=mobile.ioctl mtp-detect
    $ umockdev-run --load mobile.umockdev --ioctl /dev/bus/usb/001/012=mobile.ioctl mtp-emptyfolders

Example: using the library to fake a battery

If you want to write regression tests, it’s usually more flexible to use the library instead of calling everything through umockdev-run. As a simple example, let’s pretend we want to write tests for upower.

Batteries, and power supplies in general, are simple devices in the sense that userspace programs such as upower only communicate with them through sysfs and uevents. No /dev nor ioctls are necessary. docs/examples/ has two example programs how to use libumockdev to create a fake battery device, change it to low charge, sending an uevent, and running upower on a local test system D-BUS in the testbed, with watching what happens with upower --monitor-detail. battery.c shows how to do that with plain GObject in C, battery.py is the equivalent program in Python that uses the GI binding. You can just run the latter like this:

  umockdev-wrapper python3 docs/examples/battery.py

and you will see that upowerd (which runs on a temporary local system D-BUS in the test bed) will report a single battery with 75% charge, which gets down to 2.5% a second later.

The gist of it is that you create a test bed with

  UMockdevTestbed *testbed = umockdev_testbed_new ();

and add a device with certain sysfs attributes and udev properties with

    gchar *sys_bat = umockdev_testbed_add_device (
            testbed, "power_supply", "fakeBAT0", NULL,
            /* attributes */
            "type", "Battery",
            "present", "1",
            "status", "Discharging",
            "energy_full", "60000000",
            "energy_full_design", "80000000",
            "energy_now", "48000000",
            "voltage_now", "12000000",
            NULL,
            /* properties */
            "POWER_SUPPLY_ONLINE", "1",
            NULL);

You can then e. g. change an attribute and synthesize a “change” uevent with

  umockdev_testbed_set_attribute (testbed, sys_bat, "energy_now", "1500000");
  umockdev_testbed_uevent (testbed, sys_bat, "change");

With Python or other introspected languages, or in Vala it works the same way, except that it looks a bit leaner due to “proper” object semantics.

Packages

I have a packaging branch for Ubuntu and a recipe to do daily builds with the latest upstream code into my daily builds PPA (for 12.10 and raring). I will soon upload it to Raring proper, too.

What’s next?

The current set of features should already get you quite far for a range of devices. I’d love to get feedback from you if you use this for anything useful, in particular how to improve the API, the command line tools, or the text dump format. I’m not really happy with the split between umockdev (sys/dev) and ioctl files and the relatively complicated CLI syntax of umockdev-record, so any suggestion is welcome.

One use case that I have for myself is to extend the coverage of ioctls for input devices such as touch screens and wacom tablets, so that we can write some tests for gnome-settings-daemon plugins.

I also want to find a way to pass ioctls back to the test suite/calling program instead of having to handle them all in the preload library, which would make it a lot more flexible. However, due to the nature of the ioctl ABI this is not easy.

Where to go to

The code is hosted on github in the umockdev project; this started out as a systemd branch to add this functionality to libudev, but after a discussion with Kay we decided to keep it separate. But I kept it in git anyway, given how popular it is today. For the bzr lovers, Launchpad has an import at lp:umockdev.

Release tarballs will be on Launchpad as well. Please file bugs and enhancement requests in the git hub tracker.

Finally, if you have questions or want to discuss something, you can always find me on IRC (pitti on Freenode or GNOME).

Thanks for your attention and happy testing!

Starting tomorrow February 9th, 2013 (heh, some of you reading this might already be in tomorrow), the quality community team will start testing for cadence week #6. During this week, we as a team try and help test specific packages looking for regressions, doing new feature or hardware testing, and making sure our images are in good shape. If your still confused, there's a nice wiki page that lays out what "cadence" means in a bit more detail.

So what does this mean for you, dear reader? Well, we as a team would like you to be involved in helping us test! Everyone has unique ways of interacting with software, and naturally no two computer setups are exactly the same between us. Now, I know what your thinking -- how can I help? I'm no tester, and I don't run development versions of ubuntu!

That's ok! You can still help test without needing to compromise your system. If you don't want to install the development version on your machine, you can use a virtual machine installation instead. If you are unable to run virtual machines, or are confused at the idea, you can still help test by simply running a live session and executing tests there. It's not too hard for you! Check out this walk-through for participating using only an image of the development version of ubuntu and your computer.

To help demonstrate how you can participate, I'll be hosting two live events this next week where I'll be on-hand running through the cadence week tests along with others from the quality team. There will even be a livestream, so if your a visual person (like me!), you can see for yourself how you might be able to contribute. Here's the dates you need to know:

Monday Feb 11th, 1800-1900 UTC in #ubuntu-quality. I'll also be streaming live my participation in executing the tests .

Thursday Feb 14th, 1400-1500 UTC in #ubuntu-quality. No stream, but we'll be hanging out answering questions, and working on submitting test results.

Please consider attending a session or watching the video of the stream afterwards. If you can download an image and boot your computer, you can help test. You want to be a part of ubuntu; let us help you contribute!

We all want more quality. We all wasted too many hours trying to fix broken software and we all know that new users struggle the most when facing crashes or other unexpected results. We probably all also agree that testing is a good idea and if it’s automated, then that’s even better.

Automatically exercising large parts of some software’s functionality helps a lot in guaranteeing that things still work, even if the code or some underlying foundations change. The idea is to write the test-case once and have it do its work whenever bits change and let us know if things break unexpectedly – especially before users run into bugs.

Tomorrow, 1st February 2013, we are going to hang out in #ubuntu-quality on irc.freenode.net to have a Hackfest about Automated Testing.

So what’s going to happen there?

• We are going to have seasoned Ubuntu developers who will introduce you to autopilot (for UI testing) and autopkgtest (for integrating tests with the package in a more general sense).
• We have a list of tests we want to work on together (but you can work on your own tests if you like as well).
• We are going to have lots of fun and make Ubuntu a better place.

If you are interested, that’s great, because this is one of the coolest contributions to Ubuntu you can make. For autopkgtest it might be good to have at least a bit experience with scripting or programming, for autopilot less so. Be curious, be there, make Ubuntu better!

Check out our docs here and see you tomorrow!

If you remember our post from last time, we had gone through writing our first testcase for firefox, converting a simple manual testcase to utilize autopilot instead. In this post I'd like to talk about how introspection can be used to perform some more complicated automated testcases.

First of all, let's briefly define what we mean by introspection. Specifically, we're talking about introspecting the dbus session for an application on our screen. Trust me, it sounds worse than it is. I'll let you do your own googling if you are curious to learn more. For the rest of us, let's just have a look visually at what we're talking about :-)

If you've got autopilot installed (check out the previous post; install autopilot ppa, sudo apt-get install python-autopilot), you should be able to launch the visualization tool.

autopilot vis

A window should launch, and allow you to select a connection.  This allows you to select which application you wish to introspect. Go ahead and select 'Unity'. If the bareness of the tool scares you, remember it's a development aid, not your browser ;-)

Ok, under the Tree node, you should find a giant list of of nodes and properties for Unity. It may come as a surprise that your desktop is providing this much data about what's going on right now. For instance, have a look under PanelController->Indicators. There's entries for each indicator you are running, along with properties about each one. Ok, so what if your not running Unity? Or, for our purposes, you wish to write a test about an application on our desktop?

Never fear, we can use another feature of autopilot to help launch and introspect an application using the same tool. Go ahead and close the visualization window and enter the following.

autopilot launch gedit
autopilot vis

Notice now we have a new connection called 'Root'. Select it and you'll see the node tree for the gedit window you just launched. The amount of nodes spawned is a bit overwhelming, but you can now use this data to make assertions about what's going on when you interact with the application.

As a quick example, let's say I wanted to know the size of the current gedit window. I we look under 'GeditWindow->globalRect' we can see the current position, and infer the size of the window as well. We can also see things like the title, is_active, and other 'xwindow typish' properties.

In addition, I can find out what buttons are present on the gedit toolbar of the current gedit window. I we look under 'GeditWindow->GtkToolbar' we can see several GtkToolButton nodes. Each has a set of properties, including a name and label. 

So, let's put it all together for a quick example.
 
bzr branch lp:ubuntu-autopilot-tests

Inside the resulting directory you'll notice a geditintrospection folder.

cd ubuntu_autopilot_tests
autopilot run geditintrospection

A gedit window should spawn and disappear -- and hopefully the one testcase should pass. Open up the file geditintrospection/test_geditintrospection.py. Inside you'll notice we're using some of the properties we found while introspecting to show off how we can utilize them to test gedit. Let's cover some of the new functions briefly. You can use the autopilot documentation for more information on what you see.

     def select_single(self, type_name='*', **kwargs):
        """Get a single node from the introspection tree, with type equal to
        *type_name* and (optionally) matching the keyword filters present in
        *kwargs*.

    def select_many(self, type_name='*', **kwargs):
        """Get a list of nodes from the introspection tree, with type equal to
        *type_name* and (optionally) matching the keyword filters present in
        *kwargs*.
  
These two functions allow us to get back the nodes that match our query. For example, you can see the first step of the testcase is to check for a New File button, which is on the gedit toolbar. After asserting it exists, we then click it. Load up gedit for yourself and use the vis tool to confirm. You'll find the node under GeditWindow->GtkBox->GtkToolbar->GtkToolButton. Each button is represented, in this case we pulled the one with label=_New, representing the new file button.

Later we actually interact with gedit by turning on overwrite mode. Normally we would be unable to verify if this indeed worked or not, but you'll notice we once again check for the GtkLabel change from INS to OVR. Again, you can see this under GeditWindow->GtkBox->GeditStatusbar->GtkLabel.

Finally, you'll notice some slight differences from our non-introspection testcase. We now use GtkIntrospectionTestMixin, and launch our application via the launch_test_application function, rather than using AutopilotTestCase. I've shown gtk based examples here, but introspection works with Qt too (using QtIntrospectionTestMixin), so don't be afraid to try it out on any application you are interested in. 

You may also have noticed you branched from a project; ubuntu-autopilot-tests. I'm happy to announce this is the master repository for all the autopilot testcases we'll be writing as a community. Interested in helping contribute? Come join us and get involved! We're tracking work items, including proposed tests for you to work on. In addition, the tests themselves will soon be running on jenkins for everyone in the community to benefit.

Now introspection is still new, and we as a Quality Community team are excited about adopting and utilizing the tool.  There might be some bugs and feature requests (wink, wink autopilot team!) to work out, but we are excited to build a repository of automated tests together.

NOTE: Due to an error during build, it appears the autopilot online documentation is absent or missing pieces. If this occurs, please use the local documentation installed on your machine as part of the autopilot package. You'll find a copy you can browse at /usr/share/doc/python-autopilot/html/index.html.

When writing system integration tests it often happens that I want to mount some tmpfses over directories like /etc/postgresql/ or /home, and run the whole script with an unshared mount namespace so that (1) it does not interfere with the real system, and (2) is guaranteed to clean up after itself (unmounting etc.) after it ends in any possible way (including SIGKILL, which breaks usual cleanup methods like “trap”, “finally”, “def tearDown()”, “atexit()” and so on).

In gvfs’ and postgresql-common’s tests, which both have been around for a while, I prepare a set of shell commands in a variable and pipe that into unshare -m sh, but that has some major problems: It doesn’t scale well to large programs, looks rather ugly, breaks syntax highlighting in editors, and it destroys the real stdin, so you cannot e. g. call a “bash -i” in your test for interactively debugging a failed test.

I just changed postgresql-common’s test runner to use unshare/tmpfses as well, and needed a better approach. What I eventually figured out preserves stdin, $0, and $@, and still looks like a normal script (i. e. not just a single big string). It still looks a bit hackish, but I can live with that:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# call ourselves through unshare in a way that keeps normal stdin, $0, and CLI args
unshare -uim sh -- -c "`tail -n +7 $0`" "$0" "$@"
exit $?

# unshared program starts here
set -e
echo "args: $@"
echo "mounting tmpfs"
mount -n -t tmpfs tmpfs /etc
grep /etc /proc/mounts
echo "done"

As Unix/Linux’ shebang parsing is rather limited, I didn’t find a way to do something like

#!/usr/bin/env unshare -m sh

If anyone knows a trick which avoids the “tail -n +7″ hack and having to pay attention to passing around “$@”, I’d appreciate a comment how to simplify this.

So last time we learned some basics for autopilot testcases. We're going to use the same code branch we pulled now to cover writing an actual testcase.

bzr branch lp:~nskaggs/+junk/autopilot-walkthrough

As a practical example, I'm going to convert our (rather simple and sparse) firefox manual testsuite into an automated test using autopilot. Here's a link to the testcase in question.

If you take a look at the included firefox/test_firefox.py file you should recognize it's basic layout. We have a setup step that launches firefox before each test, and then there are the 3 testcases corresponding to each of the manual tests. The file is commented, so please do have a look through it. We utilize everything we learned last time to emulate the keyboard and mouse to perform the steps mentioned in the manual testcases. Enough code reading for a moment, let's run this thing.

autopilot run firefox

Ok, so hopefully you had firefox launch and run through all the testcases -- and they all, fingers-crossed, passed. So, how did we do it? Let's step through the code and talk about some of the challenges faced in doing this conversion.

Since we want to test firefox in each testcase, our setUp method is simple. Launch firefox and set the focus to the application. Each testcase then starts with that assumption. Inside test_browse_planet_ubuntu we simply attempt to load a webpage. Our assertion for this is to check that the application title changes to "Planet Ubuntu" - - in other words that the page loaded. The other two testcases expand upon this idea by searching wikipedia and checking for search suggestions.

The test_search_wikipedia method uses the keyboard shortcut to open the searchbar, select wikipedia and then search for linux. Again, our only assertion for success here is that the page with a title of Linux and wikipedia loaded. We are unable to confirm for instance, that we properly selected wikipedia as the search engine (although the final assertion would likely fail if this was not the case).

Finally, the test_google_search_suggestions method is attempting to test that the "search suggestions" feature of firefox is performing properly. You'll notice that we are missing the assertion for checking for search suggestions while searching. With the knowledge we're gained up till now, we don't have a way of knowing if the list is generated or not. In actuality, this test cannot be completed as the primary assertion cannot be verified without some way of "seeing" what's happening on the screen.

In my next post, I'll talk about what we can do to overcome the limitations we faced in doing this conversion by using "introspection". In a nutshell by using introspection, autopilot will allow us to "see" what's happening on the screen by interacting with the applications data. It's a much more robust way of "seeing" what we see as a user, rather than reading individual screen pixels. With any luck, we'll be able to finish our conversion and look at accomplishing bigger tasks and tackling larger manual testsuites.

I trust you were able to follow along and run the final example. Until the next blog post, might I also recommend having a look through the documentation and try writing and converting some tests of your own -- or simply extend and play around with what you pulled from the example branch. Do let me know about your success or failure. Happy Testing!

If you caught the last post, you'll have some background on autopilot and what it can do. Start there if you haven't already read the post.

So, now that we've seen what autopilot can do, let's dig in to making this work for our testing efforts. A fair warning, there is some python code ahead, but I would encourage even the non-programmers among you to have a glance at what is below. It's not exotic programming (after all, I did it!). Before we start, let's make sure you have autopilot itself installed. Note, you'll need to get the version from this ppa in order for things to work properly:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:autopilot/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python-autopilot

Ok, so first things first. Let's create a basic shell that we can use for any testcase that we want to write. To make things a bit easier, there's a lovely bazaar branch you can pull from that has everything you need to follow along.

bzr branch lp:~nskaggs/+junk/autopilot-walkthrough
cd autopilot-walkthrough

You'll find two folders. Let's start with the helloworld folder. We're going to verify autopilot can see the testcases, and then run and look at the 'helloworld' tests first. (Note, in order for autopilot to see the testcases, you need to be in the root directory, not inside the helloworld directory)

$ autopilot list helloworld
Loading tests from: /home/nskaggs/projects/

    helloworld.test_example.ExampleFunctions.test_keyboard
    helloworld.test_example.ExampleFunctions.test_mouse
    helloworld.test_hello.HelloWorld.test_type_hello_world

 3 total tests.

Go ahead and execute the first helloworld test.

autopilot run helloworld.test_hello.HelloWorld.test_type_hello_world
 
A gedit window will spawn, and type hello world to you ;-) Go ahead and close the window afterwards. So, let's take a look at this basic testcase and talk about how it works.

from autopilot.testcase import AutopilotTestCase

class HelloWorld(AutopilotTestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        super(HelloWorld, self).setUp()
        self.app = self.start_app("Text Editor")

    def test_type_hello_world(self):
        self.keyboard.type("Hello World")

If you've used other testing frameworks that follow in the line of xUnit, you will notice the similarities. We implement an AutopilotTestCase object (class HelloWorld(AutopilotTestCase)), and define a new method for each test (ie, test_type_hello_world). You will also notice the setUp method. This is called before each test is run by the testrunner. In this case, we're launching the "Text Editor" application before we run each test (self.start_app("Text Editor")). Finally our test (test_type_hello_world) is simply sending keystrokes to type out "Hello World".

From this basic shell we can add more testcases to the helloworld testsuite easily by adding a new method. Let's add some simple ones now to show off some other capabilities of autopilot to control the mouse and keyboard. If you branched the bzr branch, there is a few more tests in the test_example.py file. These demonstrate some of the utility methods AutopilotTestCase makes available to us. Try running them now. The comments inside the file also explain briefly what each method does.

autopilot run helloworld.test_example.ExampleFunctions.test_keyboard
autopilot run helloworld.test_example.ExampleFunctions.test_mouse

Now there is more that autopilot can do, but armed with this basic knowledge we can put the final piece of the puzzle together. Let's create some assertions, or things that must be true in order for the test to pass. Here's a testcase showing some basic assertions.

autopilot run helloworld.test_example.ExampleFunctions.test_assert
  
Finally, there's some standards that are important to know when using autopilot. You'll notice a few things about each testsuite.

• We have a folder named testsuite.
• Inside the folder, we have a file named test_testsuite.py
• Inside the file, we have TestSuite class, with test_testcase_name
• Finally, in order for autopilot to see our testsuite we need to let python know there is a submodule in the directory. Ignoring the geekspeak, we need an __init__.py file (this can be blank if not otherwise needed)

With python-dbusmock you can provide mocks for arbitrary D-BUS services for your test suites or if you want to reproduce a bug.

However, when writing actual tests for gnome-settings-daemon etc. I noticed that it is rather cumbersome to always have to set up the “skeleton” of common services such as UPower. python-dbusmock 0.2 now introduces the concept of “templates” which provide those skeletons for common standard services so that your code only needs to set up the particular properties and specific D-BUS objects that you need. These templates can be parameterized for common customizations, and they can provide additional convenience methods on the org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock interface to provide more abstract functionality like “add a battery”.

So if you want to pretend you have one AC and a half-charged battery, you can now simply do

  def setUp(self):
     (self.p_mock, self.obj_upower) = self.spawn_server_template('upower', {})

  def test_ac_bat(self):
     self.obj_upower.AddAC('mock_AC', 'Mock AC')
     self.obj_upower.AddChargingBattery('mock_BAT', 'Mock Battery', 50.0, 1200)

Or, if your code is not in Python, use the CLI/D-BUS interface, like in shell:

  # start a fake system bus
  eval `dbus-launch`
  export DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS

  # start mock upower on the fake bus
  python3 -m dbusmock --template upower &

  # add devices
  gdbus call --system -d org.freedesktop.UPower -o /org/freedesktop/UPower \
      -m org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock.AddAC mock_ac 'Mock AC'
  gdbus call --system -d org.freedesktop.UPower -o /org/freedesktop/UPower \
      -m org.freedesktop.DBus.Mock.AddChargingBattery mock_bat 'Mock Bat' 50.0 1200

In both cases upower --dump or gnome-power-statistics will show you the expected devices (of course you need to run that within the environment of the fake $DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS, or run the mock on the real system bus as root).

Iftikhar Ahmad contributed a template for NetworkManager, which allows you to easily set up ethernet and wifi devices and wifi access points. See pydoc3 dbusmock.templates.networkmanager for details and the test cases for how this looks like in practice.

I just released python-dbusmock 0.2.1 and uploaded the new version to Debian experimental. I will sync it into Ubuntu Raring in a few hours.