Codethink is delighted to be presenting at FOSDEM, the premier gathering for the European free and open source development community. As one of the largest, entirely volunteer-driven events, FOSDEM provides an unparalleled opportunity to connect with the wider community, exchange best practices, share new technologies and capabilities, and build relationships that extend beyond the bare code.
Many of Codethink’s clients deploy systems with expected service lifetimes measured in decades. As a result, we have a keen interest in finding ways to reduce the overall effort required to maintain such systems. In contrast to Long Term Support (LTS) approaches, Codethink finds that establishing a firm set of acceptance criteria, and continually testing while consuming the latest patches from the open source community, ensures the fewest number of known issues are present in the target environment. Focusing on Long Term Maintainability, instead of Long Term Support, involves a different initial design model, but pays significant benefits over the expected service lifespan.
Laurence Urhegyi and James Thomas will be giving the talk "Automated and continuous system testing with Lava and OpenQA" on Saturday 05 February, at 14:45 CET in the Testing and Automation devroom.
This talk will give a breakdown of what is meant by 'Long Term Maintainability', offering more detail into how systems can be designed with the ability to upgrade whilst exercising all the benefits of upstream with the least amount of overhead required. This talk will also provide an overview of how this can be achieved with a combination of OpenQA, LAVA and Continuous Integration pipelines:
- How the same tests can be used in both kernel space and user space testing
- How the same tests can run in both virtualisation (with OpenQA and QEMU, like the one we help GNOME-OS to deploy) and also on hardware
- How images are then deployed and tested in hardware (LAVA triggers OpenQA via VNC to begin testing on boards)
Codethink provides focused expert teams that can help your organisation to unlock the benefits of a testing-based long-term maintenance approach, to significantly reduce development costs over the service lifespan. Our teams can work with established infrastructure, or support deployment of advanced development environments to unlock additional productivity gains.
Links
- FOSDEM talk
- openQA project
- LAVA project
- GNOME openQA instance
- Codethink openQA instance
- Codethink LAVA instance
Related articles:
- Higher quality of FOSS: How we are helping GNOME to improve their test pipeline
- Why aligning with open source mainline is the way to go
- Why your organisation needs to embrace working in the open-source ecosystem
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- Outreachy internship: Improving end-to-end testing for GNOME
- Lessons learnt from building a distributed system in Rust
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- Outreachy: Supporting the open source community through mentorship programmes
- Using Git LFS and fast-import together
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- Automated end-to-end testing for Android Automotive on Hardware
- GUADEC 2023
- Embedded Open Source Summit 2023
- RISC-V: Exploring a Bug in Stack Unwinding
- Adding RISC-V Vector Cryptography Extension support to QEMU
- Introducing Our New Open-Source Tool: Quality Assurance Daemon
- Achieving Long-Term Maintainability with Open Source
- FOSDEM 2023
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- A Valuable & Comprehensive Firmware Code Review by Codethink
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- Flathub-Codethink Collaboration
- Codethink proudly sponsors GUADEC 2022
- Tracking Down an Obscure Reproducibility Bug in glibc
- Full archive
