I'm lucky to work with some of the most talented engineers I've ever met. As a member of the Canonical QA department, we frequently talk about automated code testing, things like: What's the best strategy to test declarative UI languages? How do we test difficult-to-reach-place X? How do we measure …
I recently contributed a number of new features to the python testtools project, the sum total of which add up to a feature I like to call 'delayed assertions'. In this post I'll explain why I needed this feature, what it's good for, and how you can use it yourself …
This post is an introduction to subunit, a tool for serializing a test result to a binary format. We plan on adopting this at Canonical, and this is the first post in a series.
We have a lot of tests that we need to run on a regular …
Over on my old blog I posted about some visualisations I made of the Ubuntu packages installed on my machine. At the time, I mistakenly believed that I had graphed the entire package repository when I had actually only graphed the packages that my laptop had seen. There were several …
by Thomi Richards | Wed 03 July 2013 | Tags : ubuntu debian packaging python visualisation
I'm using the C++11 threading support for the first time, and I must say, I'm impressed. It contains most of the functionality from the Qt threading module (which is my formative experience of a "modern" C++ threading library), but manages to cut it down to just a …
So you're trying to build a Debian package from an upstream source tree, but you're not sure what build dependencies you should install?
I have this problem all the time. For example, if I wanted to build the unity source tree into a debian package, I'd branch it …
Recently at work a colleague asked me to help him solve the following problem:
I have a string that contains escaped characters, and I want to turn that into a string with those characters un-escaped. For example, it might contain '\"' as two separate characters.
For example, a test input string …
by Thomi Richards | Fri 17 May 2013 | Tags : announcement google blog