test-agent (aka SUT)
10.14.09 - 04:34pm
A recent series of regressions for Windows Mobile (and Windows CE presumably) really drove home the need for consistent, automated testing to every one on the mobile team. As part of a new push to get testing going for these devices we reexamined out strategy of running python on the devices themselves. For various reasons that approach began to look like a lot of work with an uncertain probability of success.
The new approach is to have a very light-weight daemon running on the device which a host machine can interact with to run commands. Most likely the host machine will be running a python scripts very similar to those our current test machines do, with the exception of issuing the commands over an ip connection rather than locally.
Joel Maher went about modifying the existing test scripts (see bug 493748 and maemkit for an example) to issue their commands over ip for windows mobile and I took the task of writing the light-weight daemon, which I called test-agent (code can be found here). Its a very basic telnet shell with a few built in commands.
Everything is pretty strait forward with the exception of the exec command which attaches a debugger process to the executed command to capture stdout, since Windows Mobile ostensibly doesn’t have stdout. If anyone knows of a better way to capture output from a process, I’m all ears.
Today this set-up ran through all 437 xpcshell tests for the first time on a Samsung Omnia II. This is a major step forward and everyone is pretty excited (Yay team!).
Great news, I’m very apreciate !
Really a major step forward. Interesting concept. thanks for posting!