Coding Obsession

I’ve been part of the Gallio project since my friend Jeff Brown started it last year. In case you don’t know it, Gallio is an open source Automation Platform that emerged from the MbUnit test framework. I encourage you to go ahead and find out more about it.

One of the cool things about Gallio is that it opens the door for creating some powerful tools on top of it (hint: even commercial tools ;)). A few weeks ago Jeff blogged about one of such potential tools, an integration test management platform called “Archimedes” and composed in principle by the following components:

• A distributed test runner.
• A web-based management console.
• A repository for historical test data.
• A deployment engine.
• A scheduler.
• A notification service.
• A reporting, trending and statistics module.
• A data feed and web service for mash ups.
• Documentation.

Since Jeff is pretty busy right now he asked me to start and lead the project, and I accepted immediately (although I must admit I was a little afraid to). I think this is an exciting opportunity, but also a big responsibility. In my opinion, one of the biggest challenges in software development today is to make testing easy and cheap, there’s lot of room for improvement and we are not near to have a tools ecosystem as rich as we have for coding for example. I think the reason is that testing is a hard problem.

You can see in the component list that this is not going to be a trivial effort, but fortunately so far it looks I will get help from some smart people. My intention is to divide the project in small achievable milestones - better to have a few completed features than a lot of unfinished ones. We will see how it goes.

If this sounds interesting I invite you to come and join. For now the best place to show up is the Gallio dev list, but we will probably have a dedicated list soon.

Happy testing!

• The Gallio Project
• The Gallio dev list
• Jeff Brown’s blog (recommended reading!)
• Jeff Brown’s post about Archimedes

Julián Hidalgo Archimedes, Gallio Archimedes, Gallio