Modernizing Testbot: Next Steps & (bi?)weekly calls.

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jthorson's picture

Hey all!

First of all, I'd like to extend a great big thank-you to everyone who chipped in to work on the Modernizing Testbot initiative during the DrupalCon Austin sprints, both locally and via remote!

Now that everyone (well, mostly me!) has had time to recover after Austin, it's time we pick up where the Austin sprint left off, and get the momentum going again. To start this process, I'd like to have a couple of calls this week in order to catch people up on our Austin progress, discuss the roadmap and proposed next steps for the project, and start hashing out any architectural details that need to be finalized in order for folks to keep plugging away on the project.

I'll be holding one of these calls at the same time as our pre-Austin calls (i.e. 6:00am Saturday for me, GMT-6), and a second one at a time more favorable to North American attendees ... either Thursday pm, Friday pm, or Saturday afternoon. Exact time TBD, pending the scheduling of some outstanding RL commitments; but I'll post it up here once the timing is finalized. UPDATE: Sunday afternoon, June 29th, at 1pm GMT-6. If you're interested in joining either of these calls, and don't receive an invite, just pop into #drupal-contribute or #drupal-testing and ping me just before the scheduled time, and I'll forward the hangout link.

As an overview, here's what I expect the next steps in the short term roadmap to look like:
i) Local testing and validation of the recently added postgres/mariadb support in the drupalci_testbot project (the original Szeged proof of concept test runner)
ii) Development of the drupalci console application, intended to simplify the UX for local testing,
iii) Architectural discussions to define implementation details for adding 'test definition' file (a la .travis.ci.yml) support to the drupalci application

My hope is that these three steps should get us a long way towards providing simpletest testing support for the full array of environments supported by Drupal, albeit via a 'local testing' solution. Once at this point, I would propose releasing an alpha release, and encourage local use while we turn our attention to integrating it with the automation infrastructure. Of course, there's nothing stopping anyone from working on the Jenkins scripts and drupalci automation in the meantime, if the urge strikes them!