NAME
PITA - The Practical Image Testing Architecture
DESCRIPTION
The Practical Image Testing Architecture (PITA) is a collection of
software for doing Big Testing.
PITA is being created to allow the testing of any software package in
any language on any configuration of any operating system on any
hardware.
The primary focus are the various types of problems that go beyond your
individual system and setup. Problems that have typically been a Pain In
The Arse to do right.
Nightly Testing
Alternatively known as Periodic Testing, this involves running the
same tests on the same code periodically (for example, nightly) to
very that code involving an external or unstable system is still
working.
Smoke Testing
Continuous testing of the head of a rapidly evolving software
project directly from the software repository.
Platform-Neutrality Testing
Testing software packages on a variety of operating systems and
configurations to ensure software works across all of them.
Hardware Compatibility Testing
Testing of software packages involving compiled languages on many
different processor architectures to ensure software works on all of
them.
Dependency Testing
Verifying that software works with the language versions it claims
to, and that there are no undeclared dependencies, or other problems
occuring during recursive dependency installs.
Rot Testing
"Bit rot" is a phenomenon where software gets new bugs or breaks
entirely because of changes to the modules or operating system that
the software runs on top of.
Rot Testing involves automatically retesting the same software
package whenever a new version of one of it's dependencies is
released, so that failure due to other people's changes can be
detected quickly.
Fallout Testing
When a software package like perl releases a new version that adds
or changes features (or even fixes bugs) there can be thousands of
packages and millions of lines of code that will be impacted by the
changes. And the more code impacted, more higher chance of causing
bugs.
Fallout Testing involves testing hundreds or thousands of software
packages with a new version of a dependency to verify that changes
will not cause damage down-stream.
How Does It Work
Packages such as Test::More and Test::Builder have worked from the
inside out, starting with a single test and working towards more and
more-varied types of testing.
PITA works from the outside-in. Way outside.
The fundamental unit in PITA is an *"Image"*, a virtual hard drive that
PITA puts inside a virtual computer with a virtual CPU (of various
types) with virtual hardware (of various types).
On the Image you can install any operating system you like, just like on
real hardware, and set the operating system up with any packages and any
languages in any configuration you like, and at the end, install a small
piece of software onto the Image that is setup to run at startup time.
And then you save the Image.
You can create a few or as many of these PITA Images as you like, trade
them with other developers or distribute them within your company
(licenses permitting).
With a set of Images in place, PITA can take a software package and
inject it an Image where the image manager executes a testing scheme on
the package, captures the results, and spits it out for collection as an
XML file.
And this process can be repeated over, and over, and over again. It gets
repeated as many times as is needed, as often as is needed, on as many
packages is necesary, across a set of Images that provide a particular
testing solution.
This method can distributed or clustered extremely easily, and by
introducing flexbility through the use of plugins, PITA can be made to
work with multiple emulators (such as VMWare or Qemu) and allow the
testing of multiple types of packages (Perl 5, Python, Java, C) or even
allow you to define your own specialised testing schemes.
And further, it lets you seperate the collection of the results from the
analysis of the results. With only enough analysis embedded inside the
testing scheme for it to know if and when to abort the testing sequence,
a PITA installation will primarily just spit out a whole pile of XML
reports.
These reports can then be stored and run through analysis routines
seperately. And if the analysis code is improved, you can rerun the
analysis over old results with minimal effort.
How Do I Get Started
PITA is currently in development, and not ready for general use.
That said, the XML format and object code is completed, the Image Driver
API and the Test Scheme Driver API are working, and a proof of concept
has been completed.
So it works now. It just isn't friendly enough yet.
Work is currently underway on the components for managing sets of
images, for scheduling and managing the tests to be done, and for
implementing basic clustering.
PITA is expected to debut with very specific custom solutions for
implementing smoke testing for groups like pugs, Parrot, and CPAN.
So stay tuned for further news.
And if you would like to experiment or play with PITA in the mean time,
go ahead. That's why it's on CPAN.
SUPPORT
Bugs should be reported via the CPAN bug tracker at
<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=PITA>
For other issues, contact the author.
AUTHOR
Adam Kennedy <adamk@cpan.org>, <http://ali.as/>
SEE ALSO
The Practical Image Testing Architecture (<http://ali.as/pita/>)
PITA::XML, PITA::Scheme, PITA::Guest::Driver::Qemu
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2005 - 2011 Adam Kennedy.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included
with this module.