[Automated-testing] Farming together - areas of collobration

[Steve McIntyre]

[ Apologies for the (very) delayed response - I signed up for this
  list ages ago, then carefully filtered it away... :-/ Catching up on
  the threads now, but replying to this mail spceifically first... ]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 09:16:01PM +0000, Bird, Timothy wrote:

...

>I think one of the most difficult things will be building the ecosystem to
>support a solution here.  There are issues with finding a home for this
>stuff, in that someone will have to do maintenance work and support use cases
>that don't apply to themselves.  In other words, I'm worried about the economic
>incentives to help concentrate the collaborative effort required for this.
>
>Also, there will be difficulty getting people with existing systems to switch
>over to something new. That's going to be a lot of pain for not much near-term
>gain.  Most people just cobble together their own system, get to a fixed level of
>automation, then move on to testing or board usage within that framework.
>
>To be a bit more blunt about it, as a concrete example: would LAVA adopt a new
>system for low-level board control, if it presented itself?  I kind of doubt it.
>Who would do this work?

That's the big question, yes. In the LAVA team, we've already solved a
lot of the issues that we've seen, in our own ways. We want to be good
Open Source citizens (of course!), but it's difficult to justify
spending much engineering time on ripping things out and moving to
different underpinnings unless we can see concrete benefit. I'd expect
most teams to be the same. Chicken and egg, as you said earlier. The
key thing to make it all worthwhile will be to show the value of doing
it, while minimising the cost. Let's see where we can take that.

Cheers,
-- 
Steve McIntyre                                steve.mcintyre at linaro.org
<http://www.linaro.org/> Linaro.org | Open source software for ARM SoCs