Automated testing has greatly improved the Drupal core development process. With automated testing over 24,500 unique core patches have been reviewed, and almost 19,000 test assertions are now run against every core patch. The result has been faster development cycle, more stable releases, and the ability to add features more quickly to Drupal core.
The benefits of automated testing are now available for contributed module developers and Drupal site owners through the addition of new functionality to the qa.drupal.org and the automated testing framework (PIFR) that integrates with Drupal core.
The leaders of the Drupal quality assurance project are holding a webinar and sprint to help contributed module developers and Drupal site owners benefit from this automated testing.
- Webinar: April 1st, 1PM EST (Webinar registration)
- Sprint: Sunday, April 18th, Drupalcon San Francisco, 9AM, Coder Lounge
Contributed module maintainers:
- There are 365 contributed modules that already have tests written for them on Drupal.org
- There are 46 contributed modules that currently have automated patch testing active on http://qa.drupal.org
- Save time by only reviewing patches that apply cleanly and pass all the tests for your modules
Site owners:
- Run your own automated testing framework to test Drupal core, contributed modules for your site, and your custom modules
- Run tests on a clone of your live site database to test how changes impact your actual site with actual content
- Run coder reviews to maintain quality and consistency of code across your code base and among many contributing developers
- Run tests that require dependencies on other contributed modules like views, and CCK
If improving quality assurance for your Drupal site is important to your Drupal site development process please contact us. We are available to help your organization get involved in improving the state of Drupal quality assurance and the open source tools that help make that possible. Our goal is to identify contributors who can improve automated quality assurance for the Drupal project.
About the presenters and sprint organizers:
Jimmy Berry and Kieran Lal have been working closely on the quality assurance platform for several years.
Jimmy Berry is the lead developer for the automated quality assurance platform used in the Drupal core development process. Jimmy works for Examiner.com where he develops automated quality assurance tools for examiner.com's migration to Drupal 7.
Kieran Lal is the project manager for the quality assurance platform. Kieran is the Drupal community adventure guide for Acquia where he helps organizations understand the benefits of Drupal and Acquia's products to be successful with their Drupal sites.
Last summer, Jimmy was an intern at Acquia working on the quality assurance platform, reporting to Dries and Kieran. For the last four Drupalcons, Jimmy and Kieran have helped recruit and train Drupal developers at the DrupalCon code sprint to learn how to write simpletests for core. They are stepping up their efforts to improve the quality of Drupal with the support of Acquia and Examiner.com.
Comments
Wait, this is at 9am on
Wait, this is at 9am on Sunday morning? Well, at least it's before DrupalCon and not after!
This post is almost identical to the one on Acquia's website and I expected the "contact us" link to go there. I was surprised that it points to qa.drupal.org instead. Can you say more about how you work with organizations on "improving the state of Drupal quality assurance"? Is this for Drupal.org or for the organizations' own websites as work for hire?
Large Robot
http://www.largerobot.com
Drupal.org community work
Hi Christof, this is community work.
We are trying to educate people on how to use services that are provided for free on drupal.org. Specifically:
1) How to write tests for contributed modules, and check them into CVS
2) How to enable automated testing of their contributed modules.
For site owners we are trying to educate them on how they can run automated testing for their own site. This a two part education effort 1 hour for the webinar and a day long sprint at Drupalcon. We are doing everything we've done for the last four Drupalcons in terms of simpletest training and education by trying to get the word out so people plan to participate on Sunday and schedule their travel plans accordingly.
However, we do want more people to invest resources in the testing framework. That investment can be through normal community contributions, patches to PIFR, or to the simpletest framework in core. In the past companies (Acquia, Examiner.com, etc) have hired Jimmy's company Boombatower development to develop additional features for the automated testing framework. Jimmy is currently working full time for Examiner extending this platform, but we need more contributors, like I01 which donated a server for over a year. Of course, the biggest blocker to improving the core simple test framework and automated testing is to find a co-maintainer for Jimmy's work so that he can produce lots of small patches which are reviewed and manageable by core maintainers.
Ideally, every Drupal development firm would make automated testing part of their standard site development process just like we do for core. Our goal is to give them the education to start that testing, and help them contribute back to the testing platform.
Kieran Lal
Commercial v/s Community
So long as there is NO mention of Acquia Offerings in the webinar, this can be considered a community activity.
Im quite excited about this.
Im quite excited about this. Hope to set some stuff up for SF State to do more testing. I hope there is a wider discussion on testing frameworks as well. For instance, we are using Quickbuild which is built on luntbuild, to run the continuous integration tests.
Cheers.
Webinar replay options...
Is there any place we can download the webinar? As of now, Acquia's site doesn't list it.
I'm planning on attending the testing sprint before DrupalCon. Is there anything I should do in terms of preparation? This will be my first DrupalCon sprint so any advice would be helpful.
Thanks.
- Mike
- Mike
Webinar
http://acquia.com/resources/acquia-tv/webinar/how-build-and-maintain-qua...
can we get a copy of this
can we get a copy of this webinar, so I can watch it, since i am new to Drupal. Thanks