The Megatest Users Manual ========================= Matt Welland v1.0, April 2012 :doctype: book [preface] Preface ------- This book is organised as three sub-books; getting started, writing tests and reference. Why Megatest? ------------- The Megatest project was started for two reasons, the first was an immediate and pressing need for a generalized tool to manage a suite of regression tests and the second was the fact that the author had written or maintained several such tools at different companies over the years and it seemed a good thing to have a single open source tool, flexible enough to meet the needs of any team doing continuous integrating and or running a complex suite of tests for release qualification. Megatest Design Philosophy -------------------------- Megatest is a distributed system intended to provide the minimum needed resources to make writing a suite of tests and tasks for implementing continuous build for software, design engineering or process control (via owlfs for example) without being specialized for any specific problem space. Megatest in of itself does not know what constitutes a PASS or FAIL of a test or task. In most cases megatest is best used in conjunction with logpro or a similar tool to parse, analyze and decide on the test outcome. * Self-checking -Repeatable strive for directed or self-checking test as opposed to delta based tests * Traceable - environment variables, host OS and other possibly influential variables are captured and kept recorded. * Immutable - once this test is run it cannot be easily overwritten or accidentally modified. * Repeatable - this test result can be recreated in the future * Relocatable - the testsuite or automation area can be checked out and the tests run anywhere * Encapsulated - the tests run in self-contained directories and all inputs and outputs to the process can be found in the run areas. * Deployable - anyone on the team, at any site, at any time can run the flow Megatest Architecture --------------------- All data to specify the tests and configure the system is stored in plain text files. All system state is stored in an sqlite3 database. Tests are launched using the launching system available for the distributed compute platform in use. A template script is provided which can launch jobs on local and remote Linux hosts. Currently megatest uses the network filesystem to call home to your master sqlite3 database. include::../plan.txt[] // to allow the getting_started.txt to be a stand-alone document use level shifting, note that the preceding blank line is needed. // :leveloffset: 2 include::installation.txt[] include::getting_started.txt[] :leveloffset: 0 include::writing_tests.txt[] include::howto.txt[] include::reference.txt[] Megatest Internals ------------------ ["graphviz", "server.png"] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- include::server.dot[] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- // [appendix] // Example Appendix // ================ // One or more optional appendixes go here at section level zero. // // Appendix Sub-section // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // NOTE: Preface and appendix subsections start out of sequence at level // 2 (level 1 is skipped). This only applies to multi-part book // documents. // // // // [bibliography] // Example Bibliography // ==================== // The bibliography list is a style of AsciiDoc bulleted list. // // [bibliography] // - [[[taoup]]] Eric Steven Raymond. 'The Art of Unix // Programming'. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-13-142901-9. // - [[[walsh-muellner]]] Norman Walsh & Leonard Muellner. // 'DocBook - The Definitive Guide'. O'Reilly & Associates. 1999. // ISBN 1-56592-580-7. // // // [glossary] // Example Glossary // ================ // Glossaries are optional. Glossaries entries are an example of a style // of AsciiDoc labeled lists. // // [glossary] // A glossary term:: // The corresponding (indented) definition. // // A second glossary term:: // The corresponding (indented) definition. // // // [colophon] // Example Colophon // ================ // Text at the end of a book describing facts about its production. [index] Example Index ------------- //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// The index is normally left completely empty, it's contents are generated automatically by the DocBook toolchain. ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////