This month has involved very little programming and a huge amount of writing.

I am accidentally writing a long-form novel about openQA testing. It’s up to 1000 words already and we’re still on the basics.

The idea was to prepare for my talk at the GNOME conference this year called “Let’s build an openQA testsuite, from scratch” , by writing a tutorial that everyone can follow along at home. My goal for the talk is to share everything I’ve learned about automated GUI testing in the 4 years since we started the GNOME openqa-tests project. There’s a lot to share.

I don’t have any time to work on the tests myself — nobody seems interested in giving me paid time to work on them, its not exactly a fun weekend project, and my weekends are busy anyway — so my hope is that sharing knowledge will keep at least some momentum around automated GUI testing. Since we don’t seem yet to have mastered writing apps without bugs : -)

I did a few talks about openQA over the years, always at a high level. “This is how it looks in a web browser”, and so on. Check out “ The best testing tools we’ve ever had: an introduction to OpenQA for GNOME ” from GUADEC 2023, for example. I told you why openQA is interesting but I didn’t have time to talk about how to use it.

So this time I will be taking the opposite approach. I’m not going to spend time discussing whether you might use it or not. We’re just going to jump straight in with a minimal Linux system and start testing the hell out of it. Hopefully we’ll have time to jump from there to GNOME OS and write a test for Nautilus as well. I’m just going to live demo everything, and everyone in the talk can follow along with their laptops in real time.

Anyway, I’ve done enough talks to know that this can’t possibly go completely according to plan. So the tutorial is the backup plan, which you can follow along before or after or during the talk. You can even watch Emmanuele’s talk “Getting Things Done In GNOME” instead, and still learn everything I have to teach, in your own time.

Tutorials need to make a comeback! As a youth in the 90s, trying to make my own videogames because I didn’t have any, I loved tutorials like Denthor’s Tutorial on VGA Programming and Pete’s QBasic Site and so on. Way back in those dark ages, I even wrote a tutorial about fonts in QBasic . (Don’t judge me… wait, you judged me a while back already, didn’t you).

Anyway, what I forgot, since those days, is that writing a tutorial takes fucking ages!