Daniel Kulesz
Software Engineering professor at Bingen Technical University of Applied Sciences, study programme director of our intl. Master's program "Informatik/Computer Science" and convinced supporter of free and open source software
Session
Despite the long-term trend to automate tests as much as possible, software developers are faced with the reality where this is theoretically possible but practically hard to achieve. One good example is the Mobile Linux distribution postmarketOS, where pre-release testing is conducted manually by device maintainers and the project's community. Promising efforts to automate the process have seen work and remarkable progress for years, yet, it is unlikely that they will effectively close all gaps, obsoleting the need for manual testing.
A key challenge for manual testing is the management of the process. Testers need proper guidance by well-designed test plans while developers and release managers need meaningful testing reports. While several tools exist for this purpose, most are too complicated and too heavy-weight for community projects. With KiwiTCMS and SystemTestPortal two open source systems are available that were designed to fill this gap. However, like any server-based system, employing these systems requires infrastructure setup and maintenance.
This talk presents the conceptual idea of "SystemTestPortal Lite", an alternative to SystemTestPortal that runs completely in the web browser without the need to install or operate services. Instead, projects only need to provide data files with the test plans in their repositories. Test reports can be uploaded as files to issue trackers or the repositories so they can be aggregated before release decisions are made.