We're happy to announce the initial release of kiwitcms-robotframework-plugin! This package allows you execute your Robot Framework test suite and report the results into Kiwi TCMS! This plugin is the brain child of our Luca Valentini and Aniello Barletta and has its roots in the Robot Framework Milano user-group.

To install:

pip install kiwitcms-robotframework-plugin

and then make use of it like so:

robot --listener zealand.listener.KiwiTCMS

The plugin needs the ~/.tcms.conf configuration file:

[tcms]
url = https://tcms.server/xml-rpc/
username = your-username
password = your-password

and you can also specify the ${plan_id}, ${product} and ${build_user_email} variables in your .robot files. If any of these are missing it will attempt to discover the necessary information from your environment. The exact behavior is documented here.

This plugin uses the upstream robotframework/WebDemo test suite with SeleniumLibrary in a combination with a downstream test with the OperatingSystem library. The results are reported in TP-290. For more information checkout our package repository on GitHub!

Happy testing!

Kiwi TCMS is donating € 10000 (ten thousand euro) to our community to enable more hands working together and give an opportunity for people to get exposed to open source contributions. You can read more about the rules of the program in Round 01!

Bounties announced in Round 02

Custom pylint plugins:

#736, #738, #1126, #1303, #1384

Automation tests:

#1596, #1597, #1598, #1599, #1600, #1601, #1602, #1603, #1604, #1605, #1606, #1607, #1608, #1609, #1610, #1611, #1612, #1613, #1614, #1615, #1616, #1617, #1618, #1619, #1620, #1621, #1622, #1623, #1624, #1625, #1626, #1627, #1628, #1629, #1630, #1631

Call for sponsors

We are also calling upon teams and organizations who use Kiwi TCMS in their testing workflows. Please consider making a one-time donation or becoming a regular sponsor via our Collective. You can contribute as low as € 1! The entire budget will be distributed to the community!

Vote for Kiwi TCMS

Our website has been nominated in the 2020 .eu Web Awards and we've promised to do everything in our power to greet future FOSDEM visitors with an open source billboard advertising at BRU airport. We need your help to do that!

• Go to https://webawards.eurid.eu/?q=kiwitcms.eu;
• Point your mouse to the photo of our website and click the Thumbs Up 👍 button;
• No email or registration required!

Happy testing!

We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 8.3!

IMPORTANT: this is a small release which updates 3rd party libraries, provides several improvements, includes minor API updates and new translations. It is the first release to include contributions via our open source bounty program. You can explore everything at https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org!

Supported upgrade paths:

5.3   (or older) -> 5.3.1
5.3.1 (or newer) -> 6.0.1
6.0.1            -> 6.1
6.1              -> 6.1.1
6.1.1            -> 6.2 (or newer)

Docker images:

kiwitcms/kiwi       latest  c5dbd9a7ded6    562 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.2     7870085ad415    957 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1.1   49fa42ddfe4d    955 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1     b559123d25b0    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.0.1   87b24d94197d    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       5.3.1   a420465852be    976 MB

cd path/containing/docker-compose/
docker-compose down
# !!! docker tag to keep older image version on the machine
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi
docker pull centos/mariadb-103-centos7
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate

Kiwi TCMS is donating € 10000 (ten thousand euro) to our community to enable more hands working together and give an opportunity for people to get exposed to open source contributions. You will help us complete pending tasks faster while learning something new and receive a bonus for your efforts! This blog post outlines the rules of our open source bounty program.

Who is eligible to participate

Everyone who meets the following criteria is eligible to participate:

• Has an account on https://opencollective.com - needed to follow program updates and request payments
• Has a bank account - needed for actual money transfer, more info below!

If you are beginner in Python, Django or some other technology that we use please consider available documentation, your local user group, developers forum and StackOverflow to get help. Do not turn GitHub issues into a "getting started in programming" discussion.

Engagement rules

• Program will be split into multiple rounds as we work to clearly define what needs to be done and adjust priorities
• News and updates will be posted at https://opencollective.com/kiwitcms/updates/
• You are expected to mostly work alone on issues
• Technical discussion will be happening via GitHub pull requests and/or GitHub issues under https://github.com/kiwitcms/Kiwi unless indicated otherwise
• Translation related discussion will be happening via Crowdin under https://crowdin.com/project/kiwitcms/discussions when needed
• Do not contact individual team members privately, we are going to ignore such messages

FIFO order for code review

• Contributions will be reviewed and merged in a rolling first-in-first-out order, that is we review 1 PR and while waiting for updates continue on the next in the queue
• In case of collisions, multiple contributions that try to resolve the same problem, our team will review the first one, then the second one, etc. The pull request which is first to pass DoD and code review will be merged and the conflicting ones closed
• Please comment on issues and work together with other community members to split the work and avoid collisions as much as possible

About issues

Our team will try to clearly describe each task and what constitutes a successfully completed task, e.g. definition of done (DoD). If this isn't the case please ask questions and seek clarification about such tasks.

• Only Issues under the bounty-program milestone AND labelled with a specific monetary amount are eligible for payout!
• Unlabelled issues need further refinement before they can be accepted for bounties!

Payout rules

Once DoD has been met and the contribution is merged you may claim the assigned bounty. You must perform the following steps:

• Submit an expense to the Kiwi TCMS Collective
• All expenses submitted to the Kiwi TCMS Collective must follow the invoicing rules of our Fiscal Host. Here is an invoice template (Google Doc) you can use. Fill-in the blue parts and leave the black parts
• Invoice & expense description contains the number of issue(s) and PR(s) for which bounty is claimed

Identity cross validation:

Once an expense has been submitted add a comment with your GitHub/Crowdin username to it + open a new issue in GitHub /new discussion in Crowdin with link to the expense submission. This will help us cross-validate that we are talking to the same person between platforms.

Note on bank transfers

A message from our Fiscal Host:

We currently prefer to do payouts using bank transfers. We used to support PayPal but fees were way too high for the collectives.

About bank transfer, we do EU transfers as well as non EU (which takes more time obviously).

We noticed that several collectives are now using Revolut bank accounts which is the easiest and cheapest way (it’s free) to receive money anywhere in the world.

It looks like the fastest & cheapest way to get paid is via Revolut account if you have one, followed by standard bank transfer and PayPal account is last!

Bounties: translation related tasks

• Chinese Simplified - #1459, #1460 #1461, #1462, #1463
• Hindi - #1464, #1465 #1466, #1467, #1468
• Indonesian - #1469, #1470 #1471, #1472, #1473
• Bengali - #1474, #1475 #1476, #1477, #1478
• German - #1505, #1506, #1507, #1508, #1509
• Japanese - #1489, #1490 #1491, #1492, #1493
• Swahili - #1494, #1495 #1497, #1498, #1499
• Vietnamese - #1484, #1485 #1486, #1487, #1488
• Korean - #1479, #1480 #1481, #1482, #1483

Bounties: test automation plugins

• Django test runner reporting plugin - #693
• py.test reporting plugin - #1511
• JUnit plugin: annotation & improvement for test case mapping - #1512
• TestNG plugin - #692

Bounties: assorted technical issues

• pylint - #1192
• JavaScript: Add buttons for creating tables in text editor - #1531
• Migration from Travis CI to GitHub workflows - #1550, #1551, #1552, #1553, #1554

Call for sponsors

We are also calling upon teams and organizations who use Kiwi TCMS in their testing workflows. Please consider making a one-time donation or becoming a regular sponsor via our Collective. You can contribute as low as € 1! The entire budget will be distributed to the community!

Vote for Kiwi TCMS

Our website has been nominated in the 2020 .eu Web Awards and we've promised to do everything in our power to greet future FOSDEM visitors with an open source billboard advertising at BRU airport. We need your help to do that!

• Go to https://webawards.eurid.eu/?q=kiwitcms.eu;
• Point your mouse to the photo of our website and click the Thumbs Up 👍 button;
• No email or registration required!

Happy bounty hunting!

Scenario: Display open source advertising in Brussels airport
    Given one of the prizes is a 2 month billboard advertising campaign
    And the awards ceremony is on Nov 18th 2020
    When Kiwi TCMS wins
    Then there is good chance this campaign coincides with FOSDEM

• Go to https://webawards.eurid.eu/?q=kiwitcms.eu;
• Point your mouse to the photo of our website and click the Thumbs Up 👍 button;
• No email or registration required!

Out team promises to do everything in our power so that visitors to FOSDEM 2021 start feeling the community vibe directly at the airport!

Please vote and share.

Thank you!

We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 8.2!

IMPORTANT: this is a small release which updates 3rd party libraries, provides minor improvements, minor API changes and some new translations. You can explore everything at https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org!

Supported upgrade paths:

5.3   (or older) -> 5.3.1
5.3.1 (or newer) -> 6.0.1
6.0.1            -> 6.1
6.1              -> 6.1.1
6.1.1            -> 6.2 (or newer)

Docker images:

kiwitcms/kiwi       latest  7c1b947b9a43    561 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.2     7870085ad415    957 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1.1   49fa42ddfe4d    955 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1     b559123d25b0    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.0.1   87b24d94197d    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       5.3.1   a420465852be    976 MB

cd path/containing/docker-compose/
docker-compose down
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi
docker pull centos/mariadb-103-centos7
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate

# starting from an older Kiwi TCMS version
docker-compose down
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi:<next_upgrade_version>
edit docker-compose.yml to use kiwitcms/kiwi:<next_upgrade_version>
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate
# repeat until you have reached latest

Kiwi TCMS is the proud winner of a $10,000 award from Mozilla, Indeed, Open Collective, Ford Foundation & Simply Secure. Read below for the full story!

At the end of January Zahari alerted our team about the Open Source Speed Dating FOSDEM 2020 event and Alex was very swift in filing the application form. Just as we landed in Brussels, ready to host Testing and Automation devroom and the Open Source Test Management stand, we got the news - Kiwi TCMS has been selected as a participant.

What followed was a very hasty day of preparing a 5 min pitch and rehearsing it as much as possible so we can be ready to present our project. Alex prepared the pitch and made final review and polishing together with Anton. For the record everything was written down on paper, including important facts about the project and schedule - when and where is our slot, how is Alex going to get there, when does he need to leave to be on time, etc. We believe that preparation was key here and that's why our team always tries to be prepared when we participate at events! It was as good as it can get, no more changes!

On Feb 1st all hell broke loose - it was day #1 of FOSDEM, the Testing an Automation devroom was full with amazing speakers and packed with people, watch videos here, there was barely time to eat or drink water and at 5PM Alex had to rush across town to pitch Kiwi TCMS!

Then everything went like clockwork - weather was warm for the season, Alex decided to walk from ULB to La Tricoterie, both so he doesn't get stuck in traffic but also to regulate stress level and be clear minded for what comes next. He arrived just on time to meet with new folks and have a glass of wine before taking his turn with the judges.

Open Source Speed Dating is a format where projects pitch to a team of 3 judges who then follow up with various questions. Their goal is to assess how suitable your project is for the money they are giving away but also how would actually receiving an award help the project. You do get guidance how to prepare and what sort of information the judges are looking for. However you have no idea who the other participants are and who are you competing against! All you have is a 15 minutes slot where you have to give the best of you and hope it is enough.

Afterwards we reunited together, did even more walking, played the SPACESHIP at Let Me Out escape room and finished with a mandatory team dinner in the hearth of Brussels.

Following an internal selection process and due diligence we finally received the award. $10,000 for open source!

As a side note we also got to know who the other winners are, which can be seen from Open Source Speed Dating records: F-Droid, ossia, MNT Research GmbH and Kiwi TCMS!

We’re giving all of it to our community

All money from the Kiwi TCMS Collective will be going towards funding development tasks. Like Alex told the judges - this will help us enable more hands working on Kiwi TCMS and complete pending work faster. Stay tuned for our bounty program announcement!

Happy testing!

We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 8.1!

IMPORTANT: this is a small security and improvement release which also includes several bug fixes, internal refactoring and updated translations. You can explore everything at https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org!

Supported upgrade paths:

5.3   (or older) -> 5.3.1
5.3.1 (or newer) -> 6.0.1
6.0.1            -> 6.1
6.1              -> 6.1.1
6.1.1            -> 6.2 (or newer)

Docker images:

kiwitcms/kiwi       latest  fbb363af2d90    557 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.2     7870085ad415    957 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1.1   49fa42ddfe4d    955 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1     b559123d25b0    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.0.1   87b24d94197d    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       5.3.1   a420465852be    976 MB

cd path/containing/docker-compose/
docker-compose down
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi
docker pull centos/mariadb-103-centos7
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate

# starting from an older Kiwi TCMS version
docker-compose down
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi:<next_upgrade_version>
edit docker-compose.yml to use kiwitcms/kiwi:<next_upgrade_version>
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate
# repeat until you have reached latest

Hello testers, you can catch-up with your favorite open source test case management system during the month of March. Here's a list of events we are going to:

• March 14 - QA: Challenge Accepted, Sofia where we will have an info booth. You will get a 15% community discount if you email tickets@qachallengeaccepted.com and mention this blog post
• March 19-21 - OpenTechSummit, Singapore - aka FOSS ASIA summit:
  • Kiwi TCMS exhibition booth - 3 days
  • How to write pylint plugins for fun & profit workshop on March 19th
  • Testing [for] security [in] open source presentation on March 21st

To claim a free Community Standard Ticket use code atodorov. First 5 tickets only! For a 25% discount use code fossasia-speaker. For a 25% discount use code exhibitor-friends - applies only to Community Standard Ticket.

• March 27-28 - TestingStage, Kiev where Alex will present his Static analysis as a test tool session. You can also claim 15% ticket discount by using promo-code AlexanderTodorov
• April 1-2 - TestCon Moscow where Alex will present the Static analysis as a test tool again

Original plan was to visit OpenTest Con, Beijing between March 30-31 which has now been cancelled! The new plan is to stay 2-3 more days in Kiev and join some meetups if available.

Feel free to ping us at @KiwiTCMS or look for the kiwi bird logo and come to say hi. Happy testing!

Hello testers, this is the story of how our team is not taking part of the "QA of the year" contest organized by the QA: Challenge Accepted conference despite being nominated by Alex. In collaboration with Peter Sabev (organizer) we've managed to figure out what happened:

• On Nov 17th Alex nominated the Kiwi TCMS team for the award
• Last week Alex discovered our team is not listed on the voting page
• Then Peter told us he's not seen any nomination related to Kiwi TCMS at all which made everything feel even stranger
• We've managed to dig out browser history from November and it clearly shows the nomination form was submitted correctly
• It was even possible to load the confirmation URL and edit the submission
• Upon second submission the nomination was clearly visible on the other side, Peter confirmed this

Then after a few days we've got word back - Peter had figured out what happened. Apparently the same Google form has been opened on 2 different computers and one of them overwrote the existing submissions.

This kind of issue can be avoided by employing the following measures:

• Make the submission results public so that everyone can verify their nomination is indeed present on the list. It does take away anonymity and can also expose personal information like email/phone/employer. ID, name and submission time-stamp however will be enough
• History of edits could also be exposed publicly for extra safety
• Turn on some sort of overwrite protection similar to what you have for git branches. At the very least have a warning before allowing data overwrite
• Turn on email confirmation - the existing form didn't have this enabled
• On our side: double check submission has been received - will put more pressure on the organizing team

Sadly the issue was discovered after the submission deadline has ended so Kiwi TCMS can't participate in this year's contest. We wish the rest of the finalists best of luck and we're going to see you at QA: Challenge Accepted next month.

Happy testing!

We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 8.0!

IMPORTANT: this is a major release which includes important database and API changes, several improvements and bug fixes. Multiple API methods are now incompatible with older releases and extra caution needs to be applied when upgrading via docker-compose.yml because newer MariaDB versions are breaking direct upgrades from existing installations!

You can explore everything at https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org!

Supported upgrade paths:

5.3   (or older) -> 5.3.1
5.3.1 (or newer) -> 6.0.1
6.0.1            -> 6.1
6.1              -> 6.1.1
6.1.1            -> 6.2 (or newer)

Docker images:

kiwitcms/kiwi       latest  71a55e353da2    557 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.2     7870085ad415    957 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1.1   49fa42ddfe4d    955 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1     b559123d25b0    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.0.1   87b24d94197d    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       5.3.1   a420465852be    976 MB

cd path/containing/docker-compose/
docker-compose down
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi
docker pull centos/mariadb-103-centos7
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate

# starting from an older Kiwi TCMS version
docker-compose down
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi:<next_upgrade_version>
edit docker-compose.yml to use kiwitcms/kiwi:<next_upgrade_version>
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate
# repeat until you have reached latest

Hello testers, I have to admit that I made a rookie mistake and deleted the entire email database for the Kiwi TCMS newsletter! And of course we didn't have a backup of this database :-(. Please re-subscribe here and read below if you are interested to know what happened.

Last week, while exploring how to cancel active subscriptions for our deprecated GitHub Marketplace listing I found there is no way to cancel those programatically. So I've compiled a list of email addresses and decided to send subscribers an email asking them to cancel their subscriptions.

For this purpose I decided to import the contacts into Mailchimp because it gives you a better interface to design the actual message, include images in the message body, preview and test the message before it is sent! The import of addresses went fine, new addresses were tagged appropriately to separate them from the rest of the newsletter audience but they were not subscribed to receive emails automatically.

I selected "non-subscribed" option when importing as a second barrier to accidentally emailing people who do not want to receive regular news from us! However it turned out Mailchimp can't send messages to non-subscribed addresses! Maybe that's part of their attempts to be GDPR compliant.

So I decided to delete the freshly imported addresses, import them again and this time tag + subscribe them during the import! When selecting the addresses for deletion I am 99% confident I did filter them by tag first and then selected DELETE! And the entire contacts list was gone!

I've also contacted Mailchimp immediately to ask whether or not the addresses can be restored. Unfortunately they are trying to be super GDPR compliant and claim they don't have this information into their system anymore. And in this particular case we've been relying on the vendor to keep backups on their end so didn't even think about trying to backup this database!

For users who have accounts at https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org we do have their email addresses but we're not going to automatically re-subscribe them. We've stopped auto-subscribing 2 years ago and also there's no way of telling which addresses were on the list in the first hand.

Please re-subscribe here and I promise we're going to start backing up the newsletter database as well.

Thank you!

Hello testers as we've stated previously Kiwi TCMS has migrated to a new GitHub backend. The previous OAuth application with ID e45b09369720518e1fc3 has been deprecated.

OAuth tokens for this application have been revoked and you should have received an email notification from GitHub about this.

If you still have an active Marketplace listing we kindly ask you to cancel it until we're able to deploy the improved integration on GitHub Marketplace again.

Thank you!

Hello testers, the Kiwi TCMS team sat down together last week and talked about what we feel is important for us during the upcoming year. This blog post outlines our roadmap for 2020!

Project sustainability

The big goal towards which we are striving is to turn Kiwi TCMS into a sustainable open source project. For now this means several key areas:

1) Team
2) Technical
3) Community

Team

Right now we have a core team with 6 newcomers on-boarding. Engineering performance is all over the place with some people contributing too much while others contributing too little. More importantly there is no consistent pace of contributions which makes planning timely completion of technical tasks impossible.

At the moment we do operate as a bunch of disconnected people who happen to talk to each other from time to time.

We are going to adjust our internal processes and how we on-board new members. In fact we did our first "scrum-like" meeting this week and agreed to change our existing practice and strive to become better as a team!

Goal: to have a cohesive team at the end of the year which operates with a predictable capacity.

Goal: 1 PR/week/person as broad measure of individual performance.

Technical

The areas shown on the picture above will receive more priority.

Goal: complete remaining Telemetry features.

Goal: complete bug-tracker integration milestone.

Goal: all pylint issues resolved.

Goal: migrate all remaining legacy templates to Patternfly UI. See patternfly-migration milestone.

Goal: where FE sends AJAX requests to BE views replace with JSON RPC API instead.

Extra: start tackling the JavaScript mess that we have. This depends and is related to Patternfly migration and overall refactoring.

Extra: make it easier for downstream installations to extend and override parts of Kiwi TCMS in order for users to adjust the system to their own needs. The system is pretty flexible as-is but there have been requests, both online and offline, to provide some extra features! We'll start looking into them, likely making partial progress in the next 12 months.

Community

Last year Kiwi TCMS had massive success at every single conference that we've been to. Both project and team have been well received. While we are going to continue being part of various communities around the world we are trying to limit extensive travel and focus on functionality and partnerships which will increase Kiwi TCMS eco-system, make the project even more popular and drive further adoption!

Goal: extended GitHub integration via kiwitcms-github-app plugin.

Goal: release the following test automation framework plugins for Kiwi TCMS:

• PHPUnit plugin
• py.test plugin
• TestNG plugin
• Jenkins plugin
• Robot framework plugin
• Django plugin

For more information see test-automation-plugins milestone.

Ongoing: work with our partners from the proprietary and open source worlds. This is hard to quantify and lots of it doesn't actually depend on the team. However we are continuing to talk to them regularly. Expect new feedback to become available under GitHub Issues.

Extra: see what we can do about testing productivity! This has always been part of our mission but we have not been able to produce anything worth sharing. We do have ideas in this space but we are generally looking for partnerships and collaborations. It is very likely that there will not be very much progress on this front because it is hard to define it properly :-(.

Summary

At the end of the day most of these goals compliment each other and help drive all of them to completion. Many of the still on-boarding people have expressed desire to improve their Python & Django skills. Working to resolve issues in the above specific areas will give them this opportunity! I expect they will show good progress on their respective tasks so we can write more about them on this blog.

Happy testing!

We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 7.3!

IMPORTANT: this is a critical security update for CVE-2019-19844: Potential account hijack via password reset form!

Also migrates to Django 3.0 and includes several other improvement and bug-fixes!

You can explore everything at https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org!

Supported upgrade paths:

5.3   (or older) -> 5.3.1
5.3.1 (or newer) -> 6.0.1
6.0.1            -> 6.1
6.1              -> 6.1.1
6.1.1            -> 6.2 (or newer)

Docker images:

kiwitcms/kiwi       latest  4026ee62e488    556 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.2     7870085ad415    957 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1.1   49fa42ddfe4d    955 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1     b559123d25b0    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.0.1   87b24d94197d    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       5.3.1   a420465852be    976 MB

cd path/containing/docker-compose/
docker-compose down
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi
docker pull centos/mariadb
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate

# starting from an older Kiwi TCMS version
docker-compose down
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi:<next_upgrade_version>
edit docker-compose.yml to use kiwitcms/kiwi:<next_upgrade_version>
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate
# repeat until you have reached latest

Hello testers, Kiwi TCMS is migrating from its OAuth backend to the so called "GitHub App" backend in order to enable further integration with GitHub's PR flow as stated previously in our yearly goals. This blog post outlines the differences between the old and the new!

The old OAuth application only had access to your username, name and email for authentication purposes. Its authorization screen looked like so:

GitHub Apps on the other hand are designed for more granular access and tighter integration with the GitHub platform. This type of application still allows you to perform 1-click login into https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org. If this is your first time logging into Kiwi TCMS after the migration you will see the following screen:

Notice how the heading, information section and action button are slightly different! The important section is Resources on your account! We still only need your name, username and email address! Existing Kiwi TCMS accounts (from before the migration) will continue to work and they will still have access to all of their data previously created. Authorization of this new GitHub app (e.g. login only) does not give it permissions to access your repositories and act on your behalf.

To permit this GitHub App to access your repositories and/or act on your behalf you must Install it first. That is tell Kiwi TCMS GitHub integration code what kind of resources from your GitHub account it is allowed to access. You may install into your personal GitHub account or an organizational account! You may do this by following the Install & Authorize button on our home page or directly from https://github.com/apps/kiwi-tcms! The screen should look like this:

Initially we ask for read-only access to a few resources so Kiwi TCMS can start receiving webhooks from GitHub and synchronize information about your repositories into our database. This is documented both on the app installation screen itself (required by GitHub) and on https://github.com/kiwitcms/github-app!

Further ideas about integration between GitHub and Kiwi TCMS, including the original idea about status checks from Issue #700, can be found at https://github.com/kiwitcms/github-app/issues.

Help us grow

After this migration we're back to zero! The thousands of authorizations we've had on our legacy OAuth app can't be migrated to the new app. This also means our listing on GitHub Marketplace will be taken down and we have to qualify through the entire process from scratch.

Please help us get back on track! Here's what we ask you to do (in this order):

• Go to https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org and click the GitHub login icon, follow through with the process;
• Go to https://github.com/apps/kiwi-tcms and click the Install button, select account & repositories and complete the process;
• Share this blog post with friends, co-workers and other testers who might be interested to help!

Thank you! Happy testing and happy new year!

Hello everyone, in this article I will outline the progress that the Kiwi TCMS team has made towards achieving the goals on our 2019 roadmap. TL,DR: last year we've made lots of big and visible changes in Kiwi TCMS. This year less so. Progress has been slower than before and not so much visible. Community and team is growing. More contributors are welcome.

Complete the internal refactoring

Status: small progress, needs help

CodeClimate progress is:

• -60 code smells
• -55 duplications
• -50 other issues
• 4.4% technical debt improvement
• -240 hrs remaining until issues are fixed

The trend is showing less issues remaining but it has been a slow progress. As we fix the easier items the remaining ones become harder to deal with.

We've done minor work related to fixing issues reported by pylint. Around 150 of them still remain!

We have not done any targeted work to resolve other issues reported by Scrutinizer, remove vendored-in JavaScript libraries, JavaScript refactoring or classification of issues in 3rd party dependencies.

Redesign the UI templates with the help of Patternfly

Status: 60% done, needs help

There are 22 HTML templates remaining to be redesigned (from 59). That's mostly due to internal cleanup and some refactoring! Test plan and Test run pages are the two major templates that still need to be redesigned with Patternfly.

Modernize reporting aka Telemetry

Status: 60% done, in progress, behind schedule

The specs for the new Telemetry system have been defined after taking into account feedback on GitHub issues. Anton Sankov is the leading developer for this feature. So far we have 4 telemetry reports merged: testing break-down, status matrix, execution trends and flaky tests.

There are lots of minor issues or missing functionality in these first iterations (compared to specification). Work continues on the other telemetry use-cases and related items.

Plugins for 3rd party test automation frameworks

Status: good, needs help

UPDATE: no change in last 6 months.

If you'd like to see plugins for more test automation frameworks and/or file formats please checkout the documentation for links and more info.

Redefine bug-tracker integration

Status: 66% complete, in progress, behind schedule

We've been making slow progress on this milestone lately. For more info see https://github.com/kiwitcms/Kiwi/milestone/1

GitHub flow integration

Status: done, awaiting deployment

Our team spent some time making Kiwi TCMS the first open source TCMS available on the GitHub Marketplace. At the end of this year we were able to create a small application that allows further integration and extending the testing workflow to the GitHub platform.

This is waiting on a few more clarifications from GitHub before we deploy but for now it can be considered as done. Future functionality will be tracked and developed directly at https://github.com/kiwitcms/github-app/issues.

Agile integration with Trello

Status: no progress, will drop

This will be dropped from roadmap for the next year until we can get more interest from the community.

Improve engineering productivity

Status: no progress

Looking for external help here. This will stay as a low priority item on our roadmap for 2020 until we can free more resources on the team.

Community

Status: great, on track, needs work

This is our strongest area during this year. We have a strong presence in multiple communities, our event schedule is very busy and we are gaining more recognition every day! Core team hit several big bumps this year and is still recovering with a few more people onboarding.

Kiwi TCMS suffers from the problem that many of our users can't be contributors or simply don't want to!

In short: it is important for us to follow our mission and develop our core team so we can deliver on promises made in our roadmap! That requires a lot of time and effort which reduces short-term productivity.

Happy testing!

We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 7.2! This is an improvement & bug fix release which includes new database migrations and API methods, internal refactoring and updated translations. You can explore everything at https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org!

Supported upgrade paths:

5.3   (or older) -> 5.3.1
5.3.1 (or newer) -> 6.0.1
6.0.1            -> 6.1
6.1              -> 6.1.1
6.1.1            -> 6.2 (or newer)

Docker images:

kiwitcms/kiwi       latest  f9a8a044c34e    537 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.2     7870085ad415    957 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1.1   49fa42ddfe4d    955 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.1     b559123d25b0    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       6.0.1   87b24d94197d    970 MB
kiwitcms/kiwi       5.3.1   a420465852be    976 MB

cd path/containing/docker-compose/
docker-compose down
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi
docker pull centos/mariadb
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate

# starting from an older Kiwi TCMS version
docker-compose down
docker pull kiwitcms/kiwi:<next_upgrade_version>
edit docker-compose.yml to use kiwitcms/kiwi:<next_upgrade_version>
docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it kiwi_web /Kiwi/manage.py migrate
# repeat until you have reached latest

Hello testers, Kiwi TCMS is going to FOSDEM 2020. This is where you can find us:

• Fri Jan 31st: after 18:00 @ Delirium Café - we are taking part of the FOSDEM Beer Event where all participants are invited. Shout out with #KiwiTCMS on Twitter if you can't find us in the crowd
• Sat Feb 1st: Testing and Automation devroom - we are proud to be co-hosting this devroom together with Linaro and SUSE. CfP is open until Dec 10th 2019. Apply here!
• Sun Feb 2nd: Open Source Test Management stand - we will be together with our friends from SystemTestPortal and we are preparing some real black-box testing for you!

We would like to meet with all of you and talk about software testing, test management and test process organization. In case you are stuck for crazy ideas checkout our project mission for inspiration.

Picture: FOSDEM'19 with Kiwi TCMS, ReportPortal & SystemTestPortal

Happy testing!

Starting with version 7.0 Kiwi TCMS pages displaying URLs to bugs also contain an info icon which shows additional information as tooltip. These are designed to provide more contextual information about the bug. By default the tooltip shows the OpenGraph metadata for that URL. This article will explain how to override this in 2 different ways.

Option #1: using the caching layer

Additional bug information is cached on the application layer. The cache key is the bug URL! By default Kiwi TCMS uses local-memory caching which isn't accessible for external processes but can be reconfigured very easily. This example changes the CACHES setting to use a directory on the file system like so

CACHES = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.filebased.FileBasedCache',
        'LOCATION': '/tmp/kiwi-cache',
        'TIMEOUT': 3600,
    }
}

Then you need to poll your 3rd party bug tracker (and/or other systems) and update the cache for each URL

from django.core.cache import cache
from tcms.core.contrib.linkreference.models import LinkReference

for reference in LinkReference.objects.filter(is_defect=True):
    # possibly filter objects coming only from your own bug tracker
    # in case there are multiple trackers in use

    # custom methods to grab more information. Must return strings
    title = fetch_title_from_bug_tracker(reference.url)
    description = fetch_description_from_bug_tracker(reference.url)

    # store the information in Kiwi TCMS cache
    cache.set(reference, {'title': title, 'description': description})

Then execute the Python script above regularly. For example use the following as your cron script

#!/bin/bash
export VIRTUAL_ENV=/venv
export PATH=/venv/bin:${PATH}
cat /path/to/cache_updater.py | /Kiwi/manage.py shell

IMPORTANT

• Kiwi TCMS expires cache entries after an hour. Either change the TIMEOUT setting shown above or run your script more frequently
• How to modify default Kiwi TCMS settings is documented here
• The Python + Bash scripts above don't need to be on the same system where Kiwi TCMS is hosted. However they need the same Python 3 virtualenv and cache settings as Kiwi TCMS does
• Information about Django's cache framework and available backends can be found here
• memcached is a supported cache backend option, see here
• django-elasticache is a backend for Amazon ElastiCache which provides several configuration examples
• Both django-redis and django-redis-cache are good libraries which support Redis
• Any 3rd party libraries must be pip3 install-ed into your own docker image

Option #2: extend bug tracker integration

Let's say you are already running a customized Docker image of Kiwi TCMS. Then you may opt-in to extend the existing bug tracker integration code which provides the information shown in the tooltip. In this example I've extended the KiwiTCMS bug tracker implementation but you can even provide your own from scratch

class ExtendedBugTracker(KiwiTCMS):
    def details(self, url):
        result = super().details(url)

        result['title'] = 'EXTENDED: ' + result['title']
        result['description'] += '<h1>IMPORTANT</h1>'

        return result

Then import the new ExtendedBugTracker class inside tcms/issuetracker/types.py like so

index 9ad90ac..2c76621 100644
--- a/tcms/issuetracker/types.py
+++ b/tcms/issuetracker/types.py
@@ -17,6 +17,9 @@ from django.conf import settings

 from tcms.issuetracker.base import IssueTrackerType
 from tcms.issuetracker.kiwitcms import KiwiTCMS  # noqa
+from tcms.issuetracker.kiwitcms import ExtendedBugTracker

and change the bug tracker type, via https://tcms.example.com/admin/testcases/bugsystem/, to ExtendedBugTracker.

IMPORTANT

• ExtendedBugTracker may live anywhere on the filesystem but Python must be able to import it
• It is best to bundle all of your customizations into a Python package and pip3 install it into your customized docker image
• ExtendedBugTracker must be imported into tcms/issuetracker/types.py in order for the admin interface and other functions to find it. You may also place the import at the bottom of tcms/issuetracker/types.py
• API documentation for bug tracker integration can be found here
• Rebuilding the docker image is outside the scope of this article. Have a look at this Dockerfile for inspiration

NOTE: starting with Kiwi TCMS v8.5 external bug tracker integration classes are listed in the EXTERNAL_BUG_TRACKERS setting. If you are using v8.5 or newer instead of importing ExtendedBugTracker in tcms/issuetracker/types.py you should override the list of available bug tracker integrations:

EXTERNAL_BUG_TRACKERS.append('mymodule.ExtendedBugTracker')

Happy testing!