Automated point and click

I have been watching GNOME’s testing story get better and better for a long time. The progress we made since we first started discussing the GNOME OS initiative is really impressive, even when you realize that GUADEC in A Coruña took place nine years ago. We got nightly OS images, Gitlab CI and the gnome-build-meta BuildStream project, not to mention Flatpak and Flathub.

Now we have another step forwards with the introduction of OpenQA testing for the GNOME OS images. Take a look at the announcement on GNOME Discourse to find out more about it.

Automated testing is quite tedious and time consuming to set up, and there is significant effort behind this – from chasing regressions that broke the installer build, and debugging VM boot failures to creating a set of simple, reliable tests and integrating OpenQA with Gitlab CI. A big thanks to Codethink for sponsoring the time we are spending on setting this up. It is part of a wider story aiming to facilitate better cooperation upstream between companies and open source projects, which I wrote about in this Codethink article “Higher quality of FOSS”.

It’s going to take time to figure out how to get the most out of OpenQA, but I’m sure it’s going to bring GNOME some big benefits.