New Toolkit for Distributed Testing

Planning the design of a distributed testing toolkit for Desktop and Laptop hardware. This new toolkit will allow users to access both local and remote resources. Tests can be executed across networks, providing both SUT status and test result reporting.

Reasoning:
The current tools available for hardware testing are complex and difficult to maintain. This makes feature enhancement slow. There is a need to replace existing tools with a more powerful suite. The largest change to the current set of suites required by the teams involved is remote execution and reporting. The flexibility to execute tests on systems from a centralized location is valuable in both time and resources. In addition, the support for differing workflows is desirable. By making the new suite a library, any number of interfaces can be written to exercise those options. This provides the teams using the library to easily build an interface that exactly meets their needs and process.

Work so far:
A team of engineers from Canonical has begun work on a python library with the capabilites to execute tests across private networks just as easily as you would on a local system. Prototyping of the basic features is complete and a demo of this prototype will be presented in this session.