The Megatest Users Manual
=========================
Matt Welland <matt@kiatoa.com>
v1.0, April 2012
:doctype: book


[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 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 a distributed system 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 or task. In most cases megatest is best used in conjunction with
logpro or a similar tool to parse, analyze and decide on the test outcome.

 * Self-checking -Repeatable strive for directed or self-checking test
   as opposed to delta based tests

 * Traceable - environment variables, host OS and other possibly influential
   variables are captured and kept recorded.

 * Immutable - once this test is run it cannot be easily overwritten or
   accidentally modified.

 * Repeatable - this test result can be recreated in the future

 * Relocatable - the testsuite or automation area can be checked out and the tests run anywhere

 * Encapsulated - the tests run in self-contained directories and all inputs
   and outputs to the process can be found in the run areas.

 * Deployable - anyone on the team, at any site, at any time can run the flow

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::../plan.txt[]
// to allow the getting_started.txt to be a stand-alone document use level
shifting, note that the preceding blank line is needed.
// :leveloffset: 2

include::installation.txt[]

include::getting_started.txt[]

:leveloffset: 0

include::writing_tests.txt[]
include::howto.txt[]
include::reference.txt[]

Megatest Internals
------------------

["graphviz", "server.png"]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
include::server.dot[]
----------------------------------------------------------------------


// [appendix]
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// The bibliography list is a style of AsciiDoc bulleted list.
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// [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.
// 
// 
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// Text at the end of a book describing facts about its production.

[index]
Example Index
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The index is normally left completely empty, it's contents are
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