Hi Willie,

First off, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I work for Medsphere, the company who backs the development of the GPL testing tool, Strongwind[1].

Ken VanDine and I met at SCALE this last week and discussed some plans regarding automated testing in GNOME. We identified a few rough spots:

* Many tools are available for automated testing, and GNOME needs to annoint one with holy gnome pee so that it will become an acceptable dependency for development. Whether this is LDTP, Dogtail, Strongwind, or others, a clear decision needs to be made so that people can go forth with creating tests.

Having a mix of testing tools in use will only make it more difficult for folks to contribute to, and maintain a large body of tests.

* Someone needs to step up and write good, thorough documentation for developing tests. To my knowledge, no current testing tool has this.

* A culture of automated testing needs to be developed and fostered inside of GNOME so that maintainers feel real benefit in maintaining a high-quality test library. Maintenance is not a trivial thing.

* Distributions who already have automated tests for GNOME applications need to have a place to contribute and maintain these tests _publicly_, and have them shared by all. This was made clear in discussions with folks at this year's GNOME Summit.

Obviously, there is a lot of work that needs to be done, but these challenges are by no means insurmountable.

The first thing that needs to come into the picture are good docs. I've commited myself to contribute a Gnome Journal article on writing Strongwind tests as a first start into this field.

Cheers,

-Brad