Improvements to my helper tool for VM-based openQA testing

It’s two years since I started looking into end-to-end testing of GNOME using openQA. While developing the end-to-end tests I find myself running tests locally on my machine a lot, and the experience was fiddly, so I wrote a simple helper tool named ssam_openqa to automate my workflow.

Having chosen to write ssam_openqa in Rust, it’s now really fun to hack on, and I somewhat gratuitously gave it an interactive frontend using the indicatif Rust library.

Here’s what it looks like to run the GNOME OS end-to-end tests with --frontend=interactive in the newly released 1.1.0rc2 release (video):

You can pause the tests while running by pressing CTRL+C, or using the --pause-test or --pause-event to pause on certain events. This lets you open a VNC viewer and access the VM itself, which makes debugging test failures much nicer.

I’m giving a couple more talks about end-to-end testing with openQA this year. This month at OSSEU 2023 in Bilbao, I’m filling in for my colleague James Thomas, talking about openQA in automotive projects. And in October, at XDC 2023 in A Coruña, I’ll be speaking about using openQA as a way to do end-to-end testing of graphical apps. See you there!