Beautiful Testing

Development of ANSTE to Improve the eBox QA Process

We had decided to try to achieve full automatization for our tests. After a disappointing search for an existing solution for this problem, we set out to develop our own open source testing suite. The new product had to be strongly focused on our requirements, but we also wanted to keep it flexible enough so that it could be used to enhance the testing process of other software projects.

The set of requirements was very well defined, as we had been manually testing eBox for a long time by then and were fully aware of all the pitfalls in our testing process. Based on the extensive list of requirements, we were expecting a long development process. Fortunately, building it on top of other open source software allowed us to speed up the process considerably, and after just three months of frenzied development by only one person, we had a tool that we could already use in our testing efforts. We named it Advanced Network Service Testing Environment, or ANSTE.

The first feature developed in ANSTE was the ability to easily define complex network scenarios. Scenarios have the information about all the machines that will have to be created for a given test suite. The information for each machine includes basic details such as the amount of memory and hard disk space the machine will have and its hostname, but also more complex information, such as the number of network interfaces and their configuration, as well as the routing rules to reach ...