Alexa – Making that First Application Run

There are a couple good tutorials online, which essentially hold your hand and walk you into configuring and deploy a new application (let’s call it skill, in keeping with the Alexa jargon) but, like all good things they have their own quirks. With a constantly evolving Amazon API, it’s not really their fault. So, the scope […]

Them, Freeloaders.

A sweeping glance across a room full of people gives you a fair idea of who belongs and who doesn’t. Murial was a misfit. Like most students pretending to be financially independent, she was broke, and hiding it well. With a cheap discounted belle to  go with the only nice skirt she had, she thought […]

Navigating the UI by ipython

However brilliant an API is, one never discovers its wonders without really learning how to use it. While some API’s are developer friendly and let their utility be discovered with ease, I found one which has been a rare used tool of awesome in the hiding. Behave and Dogtail (in ipython majorly) in conjunct have […]

GUADEC’14, Strasbourg

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GUADEC’14, Strasbourg marked many things for me. My second GUADEC – check .
A QA Team kickstarted – check. Discussions with release team – check. Sightseeing and dining out with the most diverse geeks – check. Celebrating a grand birthday – check.

While the above is a brief summary of how the last 10 days were. There were some major things which stood out.

Work Stuff
We finally formalized the QA Team. Yes, GNOME components shall have tests now. We also had the “Screenshots automation BoF” which made me realize the pain documentation team goes through, clicking all those screenshots, so we finalized the following workflow, wherein QA team can help the documentation folks ease the same.

QA team writes Tests for component X → QA Team updates the status of tests for X HERE → QA team drops a ping in IRC #doc → Doc team files a bug on the component Bugzilla stating the required screenshots → QA Team updates the tests.

We are yet to try this proposed scheme but I am positive that it should take a lot of load off the designers.

I also got a chance to interact with the maintainers/developers of the various components I am planning to write tests for. Especially Evince and Weather. All of which are going to see some major UI changes in the near releases. Which is why discussing about upcoming changes played a good role in shapping my future test coverage.

Finally, I got to meet my mentors. We got some time to socialize over dinner and drinks , and talk about how to write tests effectively..

Non-Workish details
Right from Eiffel Tower and Louvre in Paris to the amazing sighseeing in Strasbourg we had an amazing time. A special thanks to these people who made dinner/drinks hunting, to Le Petite France trips so memorable.
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Also, this time around we had one of the best women’s dinners I have been to. The GNOME girls know how to make a birthday special ^_^ (and nearly made up for the people I missed on the day back home), we sung in soo many languages, had great food over some heart warming conversation.
A big hug to Karen and Marina for buying me my birthday meal 😀

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And a hug to all the ladies for being there and making the day so special.
A snap of a special gift I got from the younger one of our guests at women’s dinner..

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Signing off .. Thankyou to the organizers for doing a great job and to GNOME Foundation for having me there 🙂

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Making Evince “Behave” & GUADEC!

This is probably going to be the shortest post I will be writing, but then it’s GUADEC time! My latest component is Evince, the document viewer. I am building up on the same infrastructre as we did for Weather testing, and have put together some basic tests for the application. These can be found HERE […]

Making applications “behave”

After the previous post wherein we setup gnome-continuous, the next phase of my project involves writing tests for applications installed in it. I started with gnome-weather.To start with one can upgrade the previously installed image to latest version from build.gnome.org with “ostree admin upgrade” (restart required).There are majorly 2 ways to approach writing tests. By […]