Collabora success for Meta-sponsored OpenQA project
Mon, Jul 29, 2024
Testing in the Cloud: Enabling Fedora's openQA for flexible cloud deployment
OpenQA is a tool for functional, end-to-end testing of operating system distributions. It takes an image to test, installs it into a virtual machine, and interacts with the installation in a “human-like” way. It tests that the operating system boots and shows a graphical desktop. It moves the mouse, clicks buttons, resizes file systems, creates a username, logs in and out, and visually compares installation screenshots and matches them against expected images called “needles.” It checks that essential packages install without issue and that certain core applications function as expected.
This year we undertook a project, sponsored by Meta, to reproduce Fedora’s openQA deployment as a proof of concept in the AWS cloud. It has been very interesting for us to work on openQA especially because we have a strong CI and testing expertise in Collabora largely focusing on testing a wide variety of serial-attached physical boards and devices with LAVA on projects like KernelCI, Mesa CI, and Apertis. By focusing on GUI testing on QEMU, openQA complements what LAVA provides well.
