Preface

This book is organised as three sub-books; getting started, writing tests and reference.

Why Megatest?

The Megatest project was started for two reasons, the first was an immediate and pressing need for a generalized tool to manage a suite of regression tests and the second was the fact that the author had written or maintained several such tools at different companies over the years and it seemed a good thing to have a single open source tool, flexible enough to meet the needs of any team doing continuous integrating and or running a complex suite of tests for release qualification.

Megatest Design Philosophy

Megatest is intended to provide the minimum needed resources to make writing a suite of tests and tasks for implementing continuous build for software, design engineering or process control (via owlfs for example) without being specialized for any specific problem space. Megatest in of itself does not know what constitutes a PASS or FAIL of a test. In most cases megatest is best used in conjunction with logpro or a similar tool to parse, analyze and decide on the test outcome.

Megatest Architecture

All data to specify the tests and configure the system is stored in plain text files. All system state is stored in an sqlite3 database. Tests are launched using the launching system available for the distributed compute platform in use. A template script is provided which can launch jobs on local and remote Linux hosts. Currently megatest uses the network filesystem to call home to your master sqlite3 database.

Road Map

Note 1: This road-map is tentative and subject to change without notice.

Note 2: Starting over. Old plan is commented out.

Current Items

ww05 - migrate to inmem-db

Keep as much the same as possible. Add internal reference to almost eliminate contention on db(s).

  1. Add internal reference db

  2. Verify that actions are accessing correct db

    1. -runtests - inmem

    2. -list-runs - local (but not megatest.db)

    3. dashboard - local (but not megatest.db)

  3. Mirror db to /var/tmp…

  4. Dashboard read db from per-run db.

  5. Dashboard read db from /var/tmp

  6. Runs register in tasks table in monitor.db

  7. Server polls tasks table for next action (in addition?)

  8. Change run loop to execute in server, triggered by call to polling of tasks table

Getting Started

Getting started with Megatest

How to install Megatest and set it up for running your regressions and continuous integration process.

Installation

Dependencies

Chicken scheme and a number of "eggs" are required for building Megatest. See the script installall.sch in the utils directory of the distribution for a mostly automated way to install everything needed for building Megatest on Linux.


[An example footnote.]

And now for something completely different: monkeys, lions and tigers (Bengal and Siberian) using the alternative syntax index entries. Note that multi-entry terms generate separate index entries.

Here are a couple of image examples: an images/smallnew.png example inline image followed by an example block image:

Tiger image
Figure 1. Tiger block image

Followed by an example table:

Table 1. An example table
Option Description

-a USER GROUP

Add USER to GROUP.

-R GROUP

Disables access to GROUP.
Example 1. An example example

Lorum ipum…

Sub-section with Anchor

Sub-section at level 2.

Chapter Sub-section

Sub-section at level 3.

Chapter Sub-section

Sub-section at level 4.

This is the maximum sub-section depth supported by the distributed AsciiDoc configuration.
[A second example footnote.]

The Second Chapter

An example link to anchor at start of the first sub-section.

An example link to a bibliography entry [taoup].

Writing Tests

The First Chapter of the Second Part

Chapters grouped into book parts are at level 1 and can contain sub-sections.

How To Do Things

Tricks

This section is a compendium of a various useful tricks for debugging, configuring and generally getting the most out of Megatest.

Debugging Tricks

Examining The Environment

During Config File Processing

Organising Your Tests and Tasks

[tests-paths]
1 #{get misc parent}/simplerun/tests
[setup]

The runscript method is a brute force way to run scripts where the user is responsible for setting STATE and STATUS

runscript main.csh

Tricks

This section is a compendium of a various useful tricks for debugging, configuring and generally getting the most out of Megatest.

Debugging Tricks

Examining The Environment

During Config File Processing

Organising Your Tests and Tasks

/nfs/ch/disks/ch_unienv_disk005/qa_mrwellan/interim/src/megatest/tests/fdktestqa/testqa

[tests-paths]
1 #{get misc parent}/simplerun/tests
[setup]

The runscript method is a brute force way to run scripts where the user is responsible for setting STATE and STATUS

runscript main.csh

ww30.2 cellname/LVS/cellname.LAYOUT_ERRORS

Error: text open

ww31.3 cellname/LVS/cellname.LAYOUT_ERRORS

Error: text open Reference

Chapters grouped into book parts are at level 1 and can contain sub-sections.

[setup]

The runscript method is a brute force way to run scripts where the user is responsible for setting STATE and STATUS

runscript main.csh
[requirements]
# A normal waiton waits for the prior tests to be COMPLETED
# and PASS, CHECK or WAIVED
waiton test1 test2

The default (i.e. if mode is not specified) is normal. All pre-dependent tests must be COMPLETED and PASS, CHECK or WAIVED before the test will start

mode   normal

The toplevel mode requires only that the prior tests are COMPLETED.

mode toplevel

A item based waiton will start items in a test when the same-named item is COMPLETED and PASS, CHECK or WAIVED in the prior test

mode itemmatch
# With a toplevel test you may wish to generate your list
# of tests to run dynamically
#
# waiton #{shell get-valid-tests-to-run.sh}
runtimelim 1h 2m 3s  # this will automatically kill the test if it runs for more than 1h 2m and 3s
[skip]
# NB// If the prevrunning line exists with *any* value the test will
# automatically SKIP if the same-named test is currently RUNNING

prevrunning x
fileexists /path/to/a/file # skip if /path/to/a/file exists

If test is FAIL and previous test in run with same MT_TARGET is WAIVED then apply the following rules from the testconfig: If a waiver check is specified in the testconfig apply the check and if it passes then set this FAIL to WAIVED

Waiver check has two parts, 1) a list of waiver, rulename, filepatterns and 2) the rulename script spec (note that "diff" and "logpro" are predefined)

###### EXAMPLE FROM testconfig #########
# matching file(s) will be diff'd with previous run and logpro applied
# if PASS or WARN result from logpro then WAIVER state is set
#
[waivers]
# logpro_file    rulename      input_glob
waiver_1         logpro        lookittmp.log

[waiver_rules]

# This builtin rule is the default if there is no <waivername>.logpro file
# diff   diff %file1% %file2%

# This builtin rule is applied if a <waivername>.logpro file exists
# logpro diff %file1% %file2% | logpro %waivername%.logpro %waivername%.html

To transfer the environment to the next step you can do the following:

$MT_MEGATEST -env2file .ezsteps/${stepname}

Megatest Internals

server.png

One or more optional appendixes go here at section level zero.

Note
 Preface and appendix subsections start out of sequence at level 2 (level 1 is skipped). This only applies to multi-part book documents.

The bibliography list is a style of AsciiDoc bulleted list.

  • [taoup] Eric Steven Raymond. The Art of Unix Programming. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-13-142901-9.

  • [walsh-muellner] Norman Walsh & Leonard Muellner. DocBook - The Definitive Guide. O’Reilly & Associates. 1999. ISBN 1-56592-580-7.

Glossaries are optional. Glossaries entries are an example of a style of AsciiDoc labeled lists.

A glossary term

The corresponding (indented) definition.

A second glossary term

The corresponding (indented) definition.

Text at the end of a book describing facts about its production.