[Automated-testing] Farming together - areas of collobration

[Steve McIntyre]

Hey Otavio - long time no see!

On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 04:49:16PM -0200, Otavio Salvador wrote:
>On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 4:32 PM, Steve McIntyre
><steve.mcintyre at linaro.org> wrote:
>> 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.
>
>I understand. However, Linaro playing the important role as it does is
>an important player regarding the standardization. LAVA solves many
>important problems but providing ways to allow different farming setup
>in a standard and straightforward way contributes to increasing the
>general test coverage of code and ultimately helps everyone in the
>industry.
>
>What kind of concrete benefit are you expecting? lowering the adoption
>friction is an important aspect to me.

When LAVA was started back in 2010, there weren't any obvious FLOSS
solutions for automating our test lab so we started developing
one. We're really happy that other people find a use in what we've
done, and we're over the moon to see people contribute too.

Some of the design decisions were good (and some less so!), but over
time there have been quite a few assumptions baked in. For example, in
terms of allocating devices to run tests we ended up writing our own
scheduler. It's not impossible to revisit that kind of decision, but
moving from an already-running and (mostly! *grin*) working system to
something else is not something we're going to do in a hurry. That's
all I'm trying to say.

What would I hope to see in terms of benefit? Good support for devices
that we've not already worked on yet. Support for new types of test
infrastructure that we've been asked to work on, but not yet made
progress towards (wifi, bluetooth, etc.). We're definitely happy to
help work with people here, but there's a way to go!

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