The Megatest Users Manual
=========================
Matt Welland <matt@kiatoa.com>
v1.0, April 2012
:doctype: book
[dedication]
Dedication
==========
Dedicated to my wife, Joanna, who has, for many years now, supported
all my wacky ideas and nutty projects with only the occasional grumble
and roll of the eyes.
Thanks
------
To all the great people from the various places I've worked over the
years, thank you. I've benefitted from your patience and insight and I
hope that some of what I've learned from you has been incorporated
into Megatest.
Also, my thanks to all the wonderful open source creators. These
truly free projects, from Linux, xemacs, chicken scheme, and fossil to
asciidoc and bash are the philosophical and direct underpinnings of
the Megatest project.
[preface]
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 I 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 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.
include::getting_started.txt[] include::writing_tests.txt[]
include::reference.txt[]
[appendix]
Example Appendix
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Appendix Sub-section
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[bibliography]
Example Bibliography
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The bibliography list is a style of AsciiDoc bulleted list.
[bibliography]
- [[[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.
[glossary]
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