What’s a Smokebot?
I recently put into place a few tools that should make automated testing of Koha a bit easier. The first is an installation of smolder that will graphically display the results of the test suite. The other is an addition to the test suite to make it easier to send reports to smolder. I have set up a cronjob to run the test suite twice a day and send the results into smolder. Some people call that a “smokebot,” since it’s an automated way to perform smoke tests.
I’m hopeful that this will help is in a few ways. One is that it may make it easier for us to catch those instances where a new patch will break some existing functionality. If there’s an automated regression test to verify some functionality and it stops passing at some point, we can use the smolder to tell when it stopped working. That may help us track down the cause of the failure.
The other way that this might help is is to increase the number of platforms that koha works on. If we start getting test results from other platforms or architectures, we can become more confident that koha works in other environments.
If you have questions about how to use the test suite in Koha or how to use smolder, please don’t hesitate to ask.