Author: intrigeri Date: To: islightningreal CC: tails-project Subject: [Tails-project] Live Demo proposal: Blackbox automated testing of
operating systems: how Tails does it
Hi,
Name: Blackbox automated testing of operating systems: how we do it at Tails
Type: Demo
Topic: automated testing; Tails
Description:
Tails' releases every 6 weeks, which is a challenge in terms of
quality assurance and project sustainability. The obvious answer to
this problem is automated testing.
.
Most projects doing automated testing of GUIs or operating systems
rely upon the system under test itself, by using the accessibility
interfaces offered by modern graphical toolkits and desktop
environments. Instead, we preferred a blackbox approach, in which we
rely as little as we can on the system under test, and interact with
it in the exact same ways as a human user would.
.
Over the last three years, we have developed a ad-hoc framework that
makes this approach possible, gluing together Cucumber, Sikuli and
libvirt. It allows us to check for Tor leaks, to test booting from
(virtualized) USB sticks, and more. Perhaps it could be reused for
testing Debian?
Comments: nil
> For the Demos, whenever possible, we would prefer to have all the demos in a
> single laptop and avoid the dead time switching hardware, otherwise please
> coordinate with us to do a hardware test before the talk, and plan to have
> someone else to help you set up the hardware while you are still presenting
> the topics.
I'll probably demo some bits with videos (yay, I like cheating) but
still would like to run other bit live to make the whole thing
more exciting.
The hardware requirements for demo'ing the Tails automated test suite
are pretty high (pretty recent CPU with VT-x and VT-d, 16+ GB of RAM,
fast disk) and the initial set up takes some time, so it probably save
time for all of us if I demo'ed it on a laptop I provide.
