Projects in the topic testing

This can be seen as a subproject of ethtool netlink interface but from the technical view it's independent. Every new piece of software is going to be buggy and with frequent changes and rewrites, new regressions are introduced. Automated selftests can help a lot but as ethtool deals with hardware devices, we do not want these tests to depend on a specific hardware. The netdevsim driver was created as a virtual device which (unlike e.g. dummy) cannot be used for actual network traffic but implements various configuration interfaces so that it can be used for their (automated) testing.

labgrid [0] is an embedded board control python library with a focus on testing, development and general automation. It includes a remote control layer to control boards connected to other hosts. My idea was to use this to be able to test my MediaTek boards remotely.

Testing GUIs is hard: unit tests require a tremendous amount of mocking and often don't capture the exact user input anyway, integration tests on the other hand are difficult to setup as they often require a dedicated infrastructure with virtual machines. libuitest should become something like the image recognition part of openQA: it receives a video or image stream from some source and searches for matches (e.g. button found, sound played). It should also be able to send clicks, key presses, strings, etc. back via an abstract API to a backend.