[LDTP-Dev] Re: dogtail-devel Creating a common place to discuss automated GUI testing

[Zack Cerza]

David Malcolm wrote:
> We spent much time at the Boston GNOME Summit discussing LDTP and
> Dogtail, approaches to automated testing using accessibility, and
> testing of accessibility.
>
> Many in the wider conference outside of our meetings expressed the
> opinion that automated test suites should live inside the modules they
> test in CVS, but that no-one outside of the two testing projects
> understands the differences between them - and that this division means
> that no-one goes and writes/maintains the tests.
>   
It's not true that the only people who know the difference are people 
who hack on one of the two. Sometimes people actually *do* try both, and 
decide which one suits their needs.

> In our meeting we came up with a proposal to create a mailing alias that
> would cover the LDTP development list, the Dogtail development list, and
> the other people present in the meeting.
>
> At the wrap-up session, Jeff Waugh argued that it was a much better idea
> to simply create a new mailing list, since mailing aliases are a pain to
> maintain, and simply freeze the politics at a particular snapshot in
> time.  I think he convinced me, and convinced those of the group who
> were present at the wrap-up.
>
> So my revised proposal is to create a new mailing list:
> "automation at gnome.org" (which was what we were going to call the alias),
> with description "Automated testing of GNOME and beyond", and that we
> use this list as a neutral ground between the two frameworks where we
> can organize/help/lobby for the creation of tests that can live inside
> the modules they test, ideally unify around the best parts of each
> framework, and get the build-brigade to run these tests - basically any
> kind of discussion that improves the testability of GNOME (and e.g.
> OpenOffice, Firefox etc)
>
> Is this acceptable to everyone?
>   
I'm all for it, with two "buts": The first is that if discussion of the 
automated testing of things that aren't in GNOME CVS like OpenOffice and 
Firefox gets very active, then those projects might want to host their 
own lists on that topic. The second is that as Frederic said, it should 
be automation-list at gnome.org.

> How should we involve the ldtp-dev and dogtail-devel lists?  Can we
> subscribe one list to another? (does this work?)  Or simply ask everyone
> to subscribe to this new list, and to use it as appropriate.
>   
I think we should not subscribe dogtail-devel-list to automation-list, 
at least at first. If it seems appropriate we can cross-post threads to 
dogtail-devel-list, but the default should probably be to keep them 
separate.

> I'll try to get the new list created shortly, assuming no-one points out
> any major flaws with this plan; I'll sent an announcement as a followup
> when this happens.
>
> Thoughts?
> Dave
>   


I'm really glad we thought of this (can't remember who actually did). 
This should have been done a long time ago.

Zack