Branching

Yesterday I branched for the Bugzilla 3.2 development. Moving forward, the tip will slowly be converting to the Bugzilla 3.2 codebase while the branch will stick to 3.0.x code.

This is an experiment for me to see if I, in all my ADHD glory, can manage to keep two active branches of development going simultaneously. For those of you interested, the TESTOPIA_2-1_BRANCH is the branch name in CVS.

Right now my thinking is that this will be kept up to date for Bugzilla 3.0.x primarily for bug fixes while new development and new features will stay on the tip. I guess it will depend on how much has to change between Bugzilla 3.0 and 3.2 in the areas where Testopia hooks or patches in. Where a clean patch can be applied, it won't hurt to have new features on both.

Testopia 2.1 Released

Testopia 2.1 is out.

ChangeLog at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Testopia:ChangeLog_2.1

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/testopia/

Get it while it's hot! ;-)

EDIT:
There were a few installation issues with original tarball, also a couple nasty JavaScript issues that I missed that were messing up IE. An updated tarball is now up. Treat it as an upgrade (unpatch and repatch)

UTOSC 2008

The Second Anuual Utah Open Source Conference was held last week. This year I presented a basic overview of Ext JS. You can see the details as well as the slides at http://2008.utosc.com/presentation/68/. The session was well attended considering it was the last time slot on the last day. The examples mentioned were just those available with the Extjs 2.2 distribution.

This year's theme was HOWTO and a lot of really great presenters that live just down the street (or the hall in some cases) gave several excellent introductions to topics that interest me. Included was Matt Asay's discussion of the problem of the open commons and open source. At issue of course, is the human tendency of taking for granted things that are open and free to all (i.e. public parks) and are therefore not very well maintained.

Open source is similar. It takes enough people willing to give back in order to maintain a resource. The vast majority of open source projects out there are small, one man (or less likely, woman) operations.

This got me thinking. In all honesty, I can't say that I would be as devoted to Testopia were it not my full time job. I am extremely grateful to the handful of contributors that have stepped up and given back. Perhaps it is as Max points out, that it takes a certain critical mass before regular contributors step forward. If Bugzilla is any gague, then I am guessing Testopia has a few more years before that happens.

In the meantime, work progresses on 2.1 and I will likely release by the end of the week, provided I can get enough testing done by then to satisfy my conscience.

Bugzilla 3.2 Support

So, as many of you know, Bugzilla 3.2 RC1 was released this week. Already the questions are beginning to trickle in as to when will Testopia support 3.2. The answer is... soon.

How soon is soon? Well, I will direct you to earlier posts on this blog as well as the project site that mention the amount of work involved in first upgrading our installation of Bugzilla and then making Testopia stable with that and then porting it to a vanilla installation. Coupled with the other duties I have to perform, past upgrades have taken a month or more and I don't expect this one to be much different. Once this happens it takes a few weeks work to get Testopia ported and tested. The problem is that during the merging of the code, I pretty much have to freeze Testopia development until the base is stable. So, I am focusing my attention on getting as many features and bug fixes as I can out of the way before that happens.

I am pushing to have Testopia 2.1 ready for the end of the month.

I realize many of you are itching to upgrade your Bugzilla installations, but for now, Testopia will only work with 3.0 and that will probably be the case for the next couple of months. Hopefully in time for the final release of Bugzilla 3.2.

Off to OSCON

I'll be attending OSCON in Portland again this year. Hope to see some folks around the Mozilla booth where I will be hanging out. Come check it out if you are in that neck of the woods. I'll be standing around shamelessly promoting Bugzilla, Mozilla, and of course Testopia. ;-)


My goal this year? Get my copy of the Camel autographed by Larry and the gang. Oh, and add to my already burgeoning collection of T-Shirts.

Testopia 2.0 Final

Finally...

2.0 Final is here. A few minor bugs and a major enhancement in the form of a CSV importer made it into this release.

You know the drill... :)

Testopia 2.0 RC2

There were a few hangups with the latest RC.

First, I wanted to get the test suite finished. My goal was to have a fully automated set of tests that could be run against a sample database to demonstrate all the features of Testopia. I have had the help of a couple of students from Neumont University that have done a great job getting this started. The tests are in the testopia/t folder. What is there is a good start, but I plan to refactor it multiple times in the near future to get it up to snuff.

Second was to get the XMLRPC API fully developed. As of today it is functioning very well. This version introduces batch mode processing as well as a host of improvements. There are a number of changes that are incompatible with the old version unfortunately. The differences can all be viewed in the CHANGELOG and the updated docs can be found at http://landfill.bugzilla.org/testopia2/docs/html/api/index.html

Finally, I really needed to squash that JSON version incompatibility bug. I think it is finally working with the new version of JSON. The latest, 2.10, is required. This means you will need to update JSON before updating Testopia. You might also want to install JSON::XS which will speed JSON up considerably.

If I don't see any serious bug reports in the next week or so, this will likely be the final release candidate.

Enjoy! :D

Testopia at JavaOne?

So I just returned from a lovely week in San Francisco attending JavaOne. Why would a Perl guy go to a Java conference? Good question, but I learned a lot and can't wait to play with Groovy and Grails. I also picked up some great tips on increasing performance for Ajax apps (of which Testopia is one).

As you may have guessed, I wasn't really able to do much work on Testopia during the last week and I see there is now a Bugzilla 3.0.4 that needs to be tested. I have seen one report already that the patch does not work.

Joy! :(

One of the more interesting sessions I attended was entitled, "How to destroy your community in 10 easy steps." It was rather amusing but I learned that silence is the biggest killer. I am rather disorganized and tend to ignore email when things go crunch. Though I attempt to keep on top of the various channels of communication, often I find it gets pushed to the back burner more than it should. Before I know it, I may have gone a week or more without checking my email, or my blog. I am more available in IRC but may be too busy to answer at times. I honestly wonder how Linus keeps up with it all. Testopia is my day job, and though I love it immensely, I have never been the type to devote all my time to a single thing. When I go home, I prefer to play or work on other things. Maybe that is not what makes a good FOSS developer, I don't know. I guess the bottom line is, I will continue to develop Testopia whether anyone outside Novell finds it useful or not.

I am going to try to be better at responding more quickly to questions and bugs from now on.

A Release Candidate!

Ok, so after lots of hand wringing and questions as to when Testopia 2.0 will be ready for "prime time," I give you RC1. This release includes many bug fixes and replaces many missing features. It also includes the beta of the new XMLRPC API with support for batch mode processing.

You can get it from FTP. As there are no patch changes, you can simply drop this in place for the most part and you should be good to go.

As always, your feedback is appreciated. Even bug reports. ;-)

Leaping to 2.0

Happy Leap Day!!!

Why don't we take the leap to Testopia 2.0 while we are at it?

Testopia 2.0 Beta 1 is now available for download from the project home page at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/testopia or from Mozilla's FTP.


Enjoy.

Testopia 2.0 Checked into CVS

I Just finished checking the Testopia 2.0 code changes into CVS. Apologies to anyone on the CVS mailing list as you will have a lot of spam. LXR won't be too happy either I am guessing, but what can I say?

This is still alpha. I have not even tried installing it against a generic Bugzillla yet, nor has it been released internally at Novell. A few things to note however:

Dojo has been replaced by Ext.
You can download the Ext 2.0 package from http://extjs.com/deploy/ext-2.0.1.zip and install it in the testopia directory where dojo used to be. There is an empty folder as a place holder there called extjs. You don't want to unzip the package into it, rather you need that to be the top level of the extjs file structure. Easiest way might be to unzip the package inside the testopia directory, remove the extjs placeholder folder, and rename the unzipped folder "extjs".

Ext offers a host of new and better features, increases performance, and is just plain sexy. What is more, Testopia should now work much better with the browser made by a certain company in Redmond as well as a host of others.

API has not been updated (yet).
There might be issues with the API as I have not had a chance to test it yet with the new Testopia object modules.

Documentation is now woefully out of date.
Ah, the wonders of open source. Code is fun, docs are not. Over the next couple weeks I will try to get these up to date as best I can. For now, just play.

This version is not yet the Holy Grail of test trackers, but I hope it is a step in the right direction. As always, feedback is appreciated and you can post bugs at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Testopia

Now that I am not so overwhelmed by the task of upgrading, I might actually have a chance to catch up on the last four months of email. ;-)

Testopia 2 Preview

So, I know a lot of people thought I have gone AWOL. In actuality, I have sequestered myself for the last couple months to hack away on Testopia 2.0. Well, all the waiting has paid off.

You can now preview Testopia 2.0 at http://landfill.bugzilla.org/testopia2/tr_show_product.cgi?product_id=15

This is still pre-alpha but it is a good way towards the final goal. You will notice that it is a completely new interface with a lot more Ajax courtesy of Ext 2.0.

With any luck I will have it done in the first few weeks after the new year.

Happy Holidays!

さようなら (goodbye) dojo

That's it. I have had it with your wily ways. You say you will change, that you are an open book. Lies. I won't stand it any more. I am leaving. I'm leaving and I'm taking my project with me. ; ;

Work has begun on a brand new UI for Testopia. I am working with a number of people to get a better idea of what their frustrations are with the current UI. If anyone is interested in helping out, I have a list of bugs that I am putting together under the UI component. Feel free to add your opinions and give examples of what changes you would like to see.

One of the biggest changes will be the removal of Dojo toolkit. Their 0.9 release is a step in the right direction, but a huge leap backwards in codeability. What little documentation was there has been removed and it seems that there likely won't be any updated docs for quite some time. This, coupled with the numerous performance issues and other bugs has left me little choice but to look elsewhere for my Javascript hits.

This does not mean I am planning to remove the AJAX components of Testopia. On the contrary, I am expanding them. So far, the YUI! toolkit as well as the Ext JS framework are both serious contenders for my affection and adoration. Feel free to weigh in on these on the mailing list. Both are extremely well documented and have numerous examples. I am playing around with the grids for example, to allow the two way sorting and column preferences that people have been clamoring for.

Being as scatterbrained as I am, my focus has been entirely on refactoring code lately, which has left me little time to squash existing bugs (why squash bugs, when you can create dozens more by a little refactoring, eh?). Which is why I am grateful for the help of vrb and a few others who have answered the call to provide support and help where needed. If your question isn't answered right away, be patient. We are few in numbers and have many responsibilities besides Testopia. Rest assured though that we care, and that we will reply eventually.

Now where did I put my computer...

Welcome to Utah! (The State of Testopia)

This weekend I am coming to you live from the first anual Utah Open Source Conference
Which is being held in my home town of Provo and at the campus of Novell where I work. I was asked to present on Testopia and you can see the slides here. If they look familiar, it is because they are pretty much the same as those found in the docs directory in Testopia.

Some of the keynotes at this conference include names such as Bruce Perens, Tim Riker, and Pete Ashdown. So far it has been very informative and enlightening.

Soooo,
Many of you are wondering what is going on in Testopia development. Well, I have spent most of the last several weeks rewriting the Testopia modules to extend the Bugzilla::Object module. This is making things much cleaner in the scripts and the API. This includes writing much needed POD documentation for these modules and the rest.

I hope to next turn my attention to cleaning up many of the UI issues that have caused the majority of performance problems in Testopia as well as making things a little (read a lot) more intuitive. I still have grand visions for Testopia. Together, we can make this nation great. :)

Citizens of Testopia Unite!

Wow, You Wear Shorts Too?

Finally made it back from OSCON and a wonderful vacation along the Oregon coast. It has been a much needed break from all the mental gymnastics that I have been doing with work and Testopia. After taking care of the usual fires and sorting through the piles of email awaiting me upon my return, I finally have time to write about my experience.

First, a big thanks to all the Mozilla team for their work and their sponsorship of the great gathering of open source enthusiasts. It was great to meet you all. You can see some pictures of the Mozilla party from Wednesday night here. The Bugzilla Office Hours on Thursday at the Mozilla booth were very well attended and we even sold a few T-shirts.

Speaking of T-shirts, I picked up my years supply at the conference. I needed a second suitcase to pack them all home in which, was a bit of a problem considering we had already packed the car to the gills with two kids and all their stuff. I also picked up the coolest toy ever made for Linux, literally. The Tux droid from KYSOH was discounted at the conference. When I mentioned to my wife that they had a singing talking penguin for sale, she about ruptured my ear drums in her excitement. It is fully programmable with a Python API. Well, I have been looking for an excuse to learn some Python. ;-)

I attended a number of really great sessions that have opened my eyes to new possibilities in the web 2.0 world. I especially enjoyed the Ruby and Rails introductions that I sat in. Alas, if only Ruby on Rails had been around when Bugzilla was young. Tim Brunce also gave an excellent tutorial on some of the advanced functions of the Perl DBI which were also very enlightening.

Among the keynotes at this years OSCON, I found the talk given by Bill Hilf from Microsoft to be rather intriguing. Especially how he sidestepped questions when pressed for details on whether Microsoft plans to sue Linux users for patent infringement. You can view it at the OSCON07 site and come to your own conclusions.

I am looking forward to next year's OSCON. Who knows, maybe we will have enough interest by then to set up some Testopia hours at the booth.

Off to OSCON

After a tumultuous time getting Testopia 1.3 out the door, I am ready for a break. So, I am heading off to OSCON to hob nob with loads of like minded open source lovers/makers, and the like. Before I go though, I have released Testopia 1.3 BETA 2 which fixes some install bugs. You can get it from the download page at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/webtools/testopia/

Anyone else going to OSCON? I will be hanging out at the Mozilla booth on Thursday from about 3:00 - 5:30 pm. Hope to see you there.

Drumroll please...

Testopia 1.3 is here. This is the first version to work with Bugzilla 3.0 and mod_perl.
Unfortunately, it does not work with Bugzilla 2.22.x. For that you need...

Testopia 1.2.2 - This release fixes most of the major bugs in 1.2.1 and also should now (fully?) support PostgreSQL databases.

I appreciate the feedback I have been getting so far. This project has been my first real foray into the world of software engineering. Being fresh out of college when I started this, it has been a great learning experience. Some people have been complaining about how poor the quality is. As I have mentioned in the past, Testopia is developed against a customized version of Bugzilla run by my company. My duties are split between developing Testopia and maintaining our Bugzilla installation.

Part of the reason there are so many bugs in Testopia is that I don't have the time or resources to fully test it against the "Vanilla" Bugzilla before releasing it. My first obligation in developing Testopia is to make sure it works for my employers. Anything beyond this for the open source community is done primarily on my own time.

I am committed to making Testopia the best open source test case management system available. However, I am just one developer with limited time and resources. The point of open source is to have community support. Until the community steps up with some contributions, Testopia will have to be developed on my time line. My time line is determined by my Employer and my personal obligations.

Who comes up with this junk?

OK, so a lot of you have pointed out that 1.2.1 is a load of excretory waste. I have come to agree with you. It was admittedly a rush job that I scrambled to put out before branching for the work on 3.0.

I have made a branch that includes some fixes to the Bugzilla 2.22 base. The tag name in CVS is TESTOPIA_1_2_BUGZILLA-222 and you can update your installations with this by using the cvs_update.sh script found in the scripts directory. You will have to modify the checkout command first. Change the line that looks like:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co mozilla/webtools/testopia

to

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co -r TESTOPIA_1_2_BUGZILLA-222 mozilla/webtools/testopia

I plan to have a new tarball put together sometime next week with these fixes. That is, once I get them all done. I appreciate the dedicated work by Vivian and Dream_Turtle in helping me track these down.

If you find any additional problems, please continue to log them at bugzilla.mozilla.org.

Testopia 1.2.1

So, many of you are wondering "Now that Bugzilla 3.0 is out, when can I use Testopia with it"? Well, the answer is "Soon." That is to say, as soon as I can get bugzilla.novell.com working right with 3.0. Since Testopia is developed against this installation, much is on hold while I make this transition.

In the meantime however, LpSolit, the Bugzilla QA Guru, has put together a bunch of patches to make Testopia work with PostgreSQL databases (on Bugzilla 2.22.x). These, along with a couple small bug fixes (not being able to create new users for example *cough*) comprise Testopia 1.2.1 which is now available from the Mozilla FTP server.

Those of you who have been logging bugs, thank you for your input. I am reading them and working on them as time allows, even if I don't respond right away. Keep the feedback coming.

Testopia 1.2 and Other News

I released Testopia 1.2 a few weeks ago now. So far there have been a few bugs with it. I have been hard at work starting the port to Bugzilla 3.0. This has left me with little time for work on these bugs unfortunately. I hope to have the upgrade to Bugzilla 3.0 complete in the next couple of weeks and then go back to address these issues.

Though Testopia has been my full time job for over a year now, I have been working on it during free time as well. Last month my wife herniated two discs in her back, which has meant that I have had little free time to devote to this project. Anyone willing to take a bug or two is more than welcome. There are several very easy one line type fixes that are open right now that I haven't had time to look at. Takers?