How to test an Activity
Introduction
Activity testing is important for volunteer Activity developers so that they'll know what bugs to fix, and for end-users (teachers and students in deployments) so that they know which ones they can use. Activity testing also helps OLPC determine what Activities to ship with G1G1 laptops, and which ones to recommend to large-scale country deployments.
This page is a guide for community members who want to contribute to testing an Activity.
Pick an Activity
The first step is to pick an Activity that you'd like to test. There are many good reasons for picking an Activity, but ultimately, if you like an Activity and want to see it be more widely used, this is the best reason of all. A list of available activities can be found on the Activity page.
(We will be using Analyze as an example in the sections that follow.)
For this tutorial, we will assume that you already have the Activity installed and running on your XO, and that you already know how to use it.
Look at existing resources
The next thing to do is to look at what resources already exist for users, developers, and testers of the Activity. How did you learn about the Activity you are testing, and how did you learn how to use it? If someone wanted to find information about the Activity you are testing, where could they look?
There are usually 4 main sources of information for each Activity:
- The Activity's wiki page (Example: Analyze)
- The Activity's test page (Example: Tests/Activity/Analyze)
- The Activity's Trac component's bugs (Example: Trac query for component: analyze-activity)
- The maintainer's contact info (Example: The Analyze page has a listed contact person.)
Try searching on the wiki, on the web, and asking in IRC channels to see if any other resources exist for your Activity. Right now you're just trying to get a sense of what is out there.
Decide on testing goals
Now that you have a good sense of how to use your Activity and what resources are out there, it's time to figure out what the goal of your testing efforts will be.
- What is the "product" that you're testing? The Activity? The Activity and its documentation? The Activity and related hardware (sensors, etc in the case of things like Measure - and is an XO required?)
- What are the oracles you're using for those products to act as your standard of "correct" behavior? (feature lists, specs, etc.)
- the strategies you're using to organize tests
- How "complete" is "good enough"? (There's no such thing as "100% completed testing.")