Hello everyone, in this article I will outline the progress that the Kiwi TCMS team has made towards achieving the goals on our 2019 mission and roadmap. TL,DR: Kiwi TCMS has made progress since January, it's been tough and may not have been very visible. I feel like we've been behind schedule till now! The greatest positive thing has been community and team development!

Complete the internal refactoring

Status: minimal progress, needs help

CodeClimate progress is:

• -30 code smells
• -40 duplications
• -30 other issues
• 4% technical debt improvement
• -200 hrs remaining until issues are fixed

This is mostly the result of code reviews and minor fixes, not targeted work.

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

There are new people onboarding in the team right now and our plan is for them to start grinding at these issues very soon!

Redesign the UI templates with the help of Patternfly

Status: 50% done, needs help

There are 27 HTML templates remaining to be redesigned (from 59). That's mostly due to internal cleanup than targeted refactoring. More work on this item will probably follow towards the end of the year after we get more priority items out of the way and get more of the new team members rolling!

Modernize reporting aka Telemetry

Status: in progress, a bit 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 2 telemetry reports merged: testing break-down and status matrix. The next one will be execution trends.

There are lots of minor issues or missing functionality in these first iterations (compared to specification). Our plan is to have the major use-cases satisfied first and then work to refine all of the existing telemetry pages.

Plugins for 3rd party test automation frameworks

Status: good, needs help

Until now we have released TAP, junit.xml and native JUnit 5 plugins. There's also a PHPUnit plugin which is more or less complete but unreleased yet. Both JUnit 5 and PHPUnit plugins are developed by external contributors!

We often get asked for plugins for languages and frameworks we don't use or don't even know! Given that our expertise is mostly in Python we will gladly accept your pull requests if you decide to maintain or contribute to one of the plugins. This will also help us get insight into what automation frameworks people are using and how exactly you structure a test automation workflow around Kiwi TCMS.

Checkout the documentation for links and more info.

Redefine bug-tracker integration

Status: no progress

Last week, right after OpenExpo, we did a check-up session and this was one of the areas identified with zero amount of progress. I have a strong preference to work on this feature myself but have not been able to due to various other items that need my attention.

The short version is that I'd prefer to remove all issue tracker specific code and allow the tester to add arbitrary URLs to link to existing bugs. How to do integration (even as simple as publishing a comment in the bug tracker) over a generic interface still eludes me. In the next few weeks I will kick-off this topic with a separate blog post/issue for everyone to comment on.

GitHub flow integration

Status: no progress

Our team spent some time making Kiwi TCMS the first open source TCMS available on the GitHub Marketplace. We will continue this integration effort and flow integration will emerge from that. There's also many things that need to be done to satisfy GitHub's .

Agile integration with Trello

Status: no progress

Improve engineering productivity

Status: no progress

Our mission is to transform testing in your organization by providing the tools for that via Kiwi TCMS. It is astonishing that so far nobody has provided any kind of feedback in Issue #703 wrt improving productivity in their teams!

We have some ideas which have been blocked by lack of resources on the team and refactoring tasks. Because we've adopted this as our mission this is an important item for us and we'll continue working on it as resources allow. Progress is to be expected towards the end of the year.

Community

Status: great, on track, needs work

This is our strongest area during the year so far. We have a strong presence in several communities, our event schedule is busy enough and we are gaining more recognition every day!

• Hosted project stand at 3/5 conferences with 2 more on-track
• Won the OpenAward for Best Tech Community
• Hosted several presentations and workshops with few more on track
• Found new talent to join the core team: 2 just ready to start contributing, 5 more in training
• 1 more senior engineer as a mentor. We also have a few independent wanna-be contributors and will be hosting qualification interviews for marketing assistant very soon
• There are contributions and pull requests coming from users of Kiwi TCMS as well. We'd like to see more of course.
• There are a couple of open source projects and companies using Kiwi TCMS who are friendly towards the project. We are working with them to get a public endorsement on the website and engage in more technical work together. Of course everyone has limited resources and is very busy :-(
• Sponsors on OpenCollect are just a few but we didn't have any previously so this is a good sign.

This is the moment to mention that not all is honey and roses in open source land. Kiwi TCMS suffers from the problem that many of our users can't be contributors or simply don't want to!

Manual testers can't program. This is a fact and a good sized chunk of our user base actually performs manual testing. Those that can write automation and probably code decently well may not be familiar with Python and Django. At least in Bulgaria these two aren't very popular, definitely not among testers. That is to say this part of the user-base simply doesn't have the necessary skills to contribute and the majority of what we need is code contribution!

Another (fairly big IMO) group of users are coming from proprietary companies who view open source and Kiwi TCMS as a zero cost option. Something that they take free of charge and use it without ever contributing back. They don't understand nor really care about the open source culture.

To make things worse we receive requests every single day via our private email addresses or questions via IM despite our website clearly stating community engagement rules. On a few occasions we have received very rude comments of the sort "our company demands you fix this", "is this going to be ready this year" (context implying entitlement), etc. To make things more ridiculous we've even received support requests (via contact form) from companies and start-up who get their return address wrong so we can't get in touch directly!

In short: don't demand anything from us unless you are ready to pay for it, work for it yourself or propose a mutually beneficial scenario. We do try to keep the community happy but more importantly follow our mission and develop our core team!

Happy testing!

Kiwi TCMS is the winner at OpenAwards'19 category Best Tech Community! Big thanks to the jury, our contributors and core-team and the larger open source and quality assurance communities who voted for us and supported the project during all of those years.

This award is the best present we could get to mark the 10th anniversary of the project. More news of how we are progressing with current roadmap will follow soon in a separate blog post.

Thank you & happy testing!

Thanks to you, our community supporters, Anton Sankov and Alex Todorov took the lead at OpenExpo 2019 CfP votes. We need your help one more time. Our team has submitted participation in 'Best Tech Community' and 'Best Success Story' categories.

Unfortunately our submission into 'Best Success Story' has been pulled down! We used that category to share the story from a dead open source project into a thriving open source community with lots of users and contributors and to highlight some of our milestones. Here's the short version:

• lots of technical updates and refactoring, latest everything, modern UI
• the only open source test case management system on GitHub Marketplace
• nearly 60000 downloads on Docker Hub
• growing and active core team
• active OSS contributors

Please help us gain more recognition:

• Vote for Kiwi TCMS in the Best Tech Community category!

Thanks you & happy testing!

On Tuesday I hosted my pylint workshop during the regular Django Bulgaria meetup. This edition was the first which was practice based.

Attendance numbers were low but participation was very good. We managed to create 4 new checkers for Kiwi TCMS:

• PR #949 - AutoField checker
• PR #950 - OneToOneField checker
• PR #951 - discover directories without __init__.py
• PR #952 - empty class checker
• PR #955 - function based view checker

Many thanks to all contributors. These new checkers have discovered quite a few new issues with Kiwi TCMS so this is an area which our team is going to improve.

Those who missed the workshop will be able to catch up one of the next editions:

• 26-29 August, GUADEC, Thessaloniki - TBC (presentation)
• end of September, Python meetup, Zagreb - TBA
• 03-05 October, PyCon Balkan, Belgrade - TBC
• 11-13 October, HackConf, Sofia
• 15-17 October, TestCon Europe, Vilnius - TBC (backup presentation)
• 23-25 October, Testwarez, Ossa, Poland - TBC (presentation)
• 14-15 November, Software Engineering Conference Russia, Saint-Petersburg - TBC
• 20-22 November, ConTEST, New York - TBC (workshop and/or presentation)

Happy testing!

We are happy to announce that Anton Sankov and Alex Todorov are currently taking the lead at OpenExpo Europe's CfP votes!

Going to OpenExpo will be huge boost for Kiwi TCMS so please help us make this happen! Voting is open until March 17th 2019! You can cast your vote via Facebook login but remember to confirm your email address!

• Vote for Alex'es cyber security presentation
• Vote for Anton's micro-services tech talk
• Vote for Alex'es pylint plugins tech-talk: currently 3rd in the Open Source Tech Talks category

Thank you & happy testing!

Have you ever wanted to be part of an open source team? Have you ever wanted to contribute back the open source community ? Have you ever wanted to see your code used by thousands of people ?

If yes now you have the opportunity! Read on to learn how you can help Kiwi TCMS and how our team can help you.

Inexperienced Python developer(s)

It is fine not to have any experience at all! You will compensate with commitment and hard work. Initially you are going to work on refactoring, cleaning up pylint errors, removing duplicate code and other issues reported by CodeClimate.

By doing this you will have the opportunity to learn git, Python, Django, some CSS, JavaScript and Patternfly HTML of course. We are going to provide you with all the learning materials plus help and guidance from existing team members.

Everyone on the team has gone though the same training procedure and grueling tasks and so will you! Once you can demonstrate progress and learn the ropes you will continue working on more complicated tasks.

Experienced Python developer(s)

So you have some experience already, you've probably contributed code before and are now looking for more green stripes on your GitHub profile. We've got you covered!

There are many areas to choose from: issue tracker integration, GitHub integration, GitLab integration, external API library, Kiwi TCMS plugins written in Python and customized pylint linters! This is going to be where you get your hands dirty and show your strengths. Our team is here to help if necessary but we expect you to show progress by yourself.

A challenge for you will be to review pull requests from other contributors and be patient with less experienced contributors and team members. This is an excellent opportunity to work on your people skills as well.

Experienced non-Python developer(s) (with Java)

Kiwi TCMS is primarily looking for Java developers who will own our test automation plugins. Currently we have a plugin for JUnit 5 and TestNG is in planning. Maybe there will be a plugin for Jenkins as well. You are going to own these components and work solely on them. Unless you decide to learn Python and Django that would be a very easy job!

.NET, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript ? We don't have a lot of code written in these languages but you can help change this. The main thing we'd like you to know (or become familiar with) are the internals of popular test automation frameworks for these languages and how to create plugins for them.

QA engineer with Python

You are going to test a lot! You are going to write test automation a lot! Ideally you already have a medium level of experience in the software testing field and want to improve your coding skills and/or get more experience into a different application domain. We also have Linux and Docker in the mix, just for fun!

Your responsibility will be to design test scenarios for various features (new or existing), write test automation scripts and help improve overall test coverage and quality of Kiwi TCMS. You will also check-in on non-Python developers and help them with test design when necessary.

There are other things that can be tested as well, for example Kiwi TCMS performance and scalability. Here you will have to get down to the nitty-gritty stuff and do some profiling to pin-point where the root cause of the problem is.

Security freak

We've got Coverity scan and Snyk automatically inspecting our code base. We do have some other tools as well and we know they can never be enough.

You will be responsible for triaging the numerous issues being reported by these tools and help us decide if they are a real threat or a false positive. For example Coverity reports hundreds of issues mostly coming from our Python and Node.js dependency stack. We haven't had the time to classify them and work with upstream communities to fix them thus the majority of your contributions will be outside of the Kiwi TCMS code base.

Graphics designer

Your main job is going to be creating beautiful images for our website, blog posts and promotional material. All the images we use are licensed under Creative Commons which we then modify with the specific Kiwi TCMS look and feel. This is not going to change, your work will remain under a permissive license!

Marketing specialist

You will be directly responsible for driving more traffic to our website, interpreting Google Analytics metrics and coming up with creative ideas how to boost Kiwi TCMS popularity. This means, but not limited to blog posts, collaborations with other projects and/or bloggers, professional magazines, etc. You will also be in charge of events and conferences that we go to! Whenever possible you will be coming with us as well!

A challenge for you will be to learn some technical jargon and learn more about the software testing profession and software testers in general!

What's in it for you ?

You will sharpen your skills! You will use Kiwi TCMS as a platform to improve your career. You will experience the gratification of our community of users.

This blog is the medium where you can share tips and tricks and technical articles about interesting features in Kiwi TCMS. If you'd rather have your personal blog working on Kiwi TCMS will give you lots of topics to write about.

We go to conferences and meetups too. If public speaking is your thing you will have plenty of topics to talk about. We can also help you deliver your first presentation! Everyone on the team has done it!

Our existing team will help you learn and we will help you grow. Our personal time is the most expensive item we can offer to you! In return we expect you to fulfill your commitments and when you promise something will be done you will make sure it is done!

How to apply ?

You can figure this out yourself.

Happy testing!

In release notes for v6.5 we announced several plugins which will fetch test names and execution results from your automated test suite.

Plugins can be controlled via environment variables which will affect how test results are recorded in the Kiwi TCMS database! This blog post is an introduction how that works and what you can do with it! For this purpose I will be using the plugin-demo repository, which simulates real development work.

Full documentation and list of available plugins is available in chapter Automation Frameworks Plugins!

Always create new TestRun by default

The default behavior is always to create a new TestRun if controlling variables are not overridden! Product name, version and build will receive default values if tests are running in Travis CI or Jenkins. For example Travis Build #2 for commit d455fb4 creates TR-12 and TP-10!

Product=kiwitcms/plugin-demo
Version=d455fb42fb7c2aedadfd5f66de7d131109c03350
Build=2

Next we convert the README file from Markdown to reStructuredText which triggers Travis Build #3 for commit 418b80b. This build again creates a new TestRun and new TestPlan for it. Respectively TR-14 and TP-12!

Product=kiwitcms/plugin-demo
Version=418b80b3bbb65a799f695dc59d488c76f560fa2b
Build=3

Important: we can see that version is different which will affect how artifacts are organized in Kiwi TCMS, possibly affect how you will report status to stakeholders!

Override ENV variables for more control

Let's say the QA team has decided that all test results must be reported under the same TestPlan. This means version must be the same between various builds in Travis CI! To control this we export TCMS_PRODUCT_VERSION=master in CI before executing the TAP plugin! Checkout the commit on GitHub to see how it is done!

This triggers Travis Build #4 for commit e484e59. Because this is the first time where Version == master the plugin creates TP-14 and reports the results under TR-16.

Product=kiwitcms/plugin-demo
Version=master
Build=4

Right after that I realized we can make this configuration a bit more generic because our team is planning to support multiple versions of the product and development will be done in separate branches! Travis Build #5 for commit f1f2878 still ends up with Version == master because we are still working on the master branch! That is to say, the product is in active mode of development.

Results are reported in TR-18 which is again part of TP-14.

Product=kiwitcms/plugin-demo
Version=master
Build=5

Travis Build #6 for commit df6153b adds the new functionality README badges and reports test results in TR-20 which is again part of TP-14.

More ENV overrides

While giving status reports back to stakeholders and developers the information that we have in the TestRun is Build number! This follows the numbering scheme in Travis CI (or Jenkins job number) and isn't very useful.

Let's define TCMS_BUILD to be the first 7 characters of the commit hash! When QA tells devel that something isn't working and redirects them to the TestRun they can immediately use the Build information and git checkout the offending variant of the product for investigation.

This results in Travis Build #7 for commit bf75d0a, TR-22, TP-14.

Product=kiwitcms/plugin-demo
Version=master
Build=bf75d0a

Report results in pre-existing TestRun

There are many reasons you may want to do this:

• include both manual and automation tests for the same build;
• mix results from multiple test suites for the same build, e.g. unit, functional, performance
• mix results from multiple but similar platforms in the same build, e.g. cross-platform application for iOS and Android

To do so I've created TR-24 beforehand and configured TCMS_RUN_ID=24 in my CI environment. TR-24 also contains TC-57: Verify we can report results from several plugins into the same TR. this was created and added via the web interface.

Note: mixing additional test cases can be done either before or after automation results are reported with the plugin!

Important: when reporting results to an existing TestRun Kiwi TCMS plugins don't care in which TestPlan this TR is! In theory it is possible to report the results for Product=kiwitcms/plugin-demo into any TP/TR pair! However we don't want to do this crazy thing and instead I've created TR-24 inside the already existing TP-14!

Note: because I don't know what is the git commit beforehand I've configured TR-24 with Build=unspecified. If I wanted I could update this with the correct value once I know the commit hash for the related changes I am testing.

Important: the plugin-demo repository uses both kiwitcms-tap-plugin and kiwitcms-junit.xml-plugin at the same time! They differ in the way test names are compiled! Both are reported in TR-24. See TC-57 text for information how to distinguish between the two.

See Travis Build #8 for commit 85ad939, TR-24, TP-14.

Product=kiwitcms/plugin-demo
Version=master
Build=unspecified

Also check-out comments in TR executions to see when and who had executed the test case.

So far there have been some tests which were failing (although Travis reports PASS) so I decided to fix them. Travis Build #9 for commit a25b384 is still configured with TCMS_RUN_ID=24. This means results will be reported in TR-24, effectively overwriting previous results.

Check-out Change Log under each individual execution and you will see several time stamps when status was updated! In other words, as long as TCMS_RUN_ID is pointing to an existing TestRun this TR will keep the results of the last test suite execution!

Continue development, restore ENV configuration

Travis Build #10 for commit c4f1ae5 removes TCMS_RUN_ID! Results are reported in TR-25, TP-14.

Product=kiwitcms/plugin-demo
Version=master
Build=c4f1ae5

Branch out for an LTS version

Our team has decided to make the first LTS release of the product. We branch out into lts-v0 branch in git and cut the first NVR. This results in Travis Build #11 for commit 9f1ef71 TR-27, TP-16.

Product=kiwitcms/plugin-demo
Version=lts-v0
Build=9f1ef71

Because this is the first time we are running tests for this product version we end up with the newly created TP-16!

Note: see how version was populated with the correct value for the git branch! This is because my CI config uses TCMS_PRODUCT_VERSION=$TRAVIS_BRANCH and no further changes were required! I made this change back in Travis Build #5 anticipating what will come in the future!

The product is now live and customers have reported critical bugs for it: URLs for the badges in README are wrong! I fix those and add more tests of course, see: Travis Build #12 for commit 2d72754, TR-29 for TP-16.

Product=kiwitcms/plugin-demo
Version=lts-v0
Build=2d72754

TR-29 contains the new TC-58!

cherry-pick between branches

In the lts-v0 branch customers have identified a serious issue. It doesn't exist on master but the test is still valid so I cherry-pick it! In git you can backport or forwardport very easily. Regardless of the direction Kiwi TCMS plugins will record the test results for you.

See Travis Build #13 for commit 31ae5b3, TR-31 for TP-14.

We can see that TC-58, which was originally implemented on the lts-v0 branch is now present!

Summary

This is a very basic example of how you can organize collection and reporting for your automation test suite results with Kiwi TCMS. The links here only refer to artifacts created by kiwitcms-tap-plugin while in the DB we keep others as well.

There are feature requests for more ENV variables which will allow you to control TestPlan creation and child/parent relationship between test plans. See https://github.com/kiwitcms/tap-plugin/issues and vote with a :+1: reaction to help us plan for these features.

Kiwi TCMS automation framework plugins are nothing more than result parsers which talk back to a database. It is up to you to decide how to organize the collection of test results and how to report on them later, when the need arises.

Future installments in this post series will take a look at workflows with feature branches and pull requests and discuss possible organization scenarios. You are welcome to share your ideas in the comments below.

Happy testing!

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

• Fri Feb 1st: 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
• Both days: Building K, Level 2, Stand 10. We will be together with our friends from ReportPortal and SystemTestPortal at the Open Source Test Management stand
• Sat Feb 2nd: 18:00 @ Room H.2215 (Lightning Talks) - 10 years of open source test case management with Kiwi TCMS lightning talk
• Sun Feb 3rd: 10:00 @ UD2.120 (Python devroom) - How to write pylint plugins presentation with examples of plugins which our team uses to make Kiwi TCMS better

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

Be part of the community

We are turning 10 years old and we have presents for you! You will have to perform a small challenge and you can get your hands(errr, feet) on a pair of these:

Here's what else you can do to help us:

• Become a stargazer by clicking the Star button on our GitHub repository
• Follow @KiwiTCMS on Twitter
• Subscribe to our newsletter - we are GDPR compliant and we don't spam, we promise!
• Send us testimonials and feedback about using Kiwi TCMS. We will be happy to publish them on our website
• Become a sponsor!

Happy testing!

Hello testers, Kiwi TCMS has taken on a brave new mission! We would like to transform the testing process by making it more organized, transparent & accountable for everyone on your team. Our goal is to improve engineering productivity and participation in testing. The following blog post outlines how we would like to achieve this and what goals we put before ourselves for this year.

Complete the internal refactoring

Last year we took on the challenge to bring a legacy code base up to modern coding standard. We did not complete that effort but made very good progress along the way. This is not a small task and that's why our team will continue with it this year.

• CodeClimate: 0 issues, 0% technical debt, health score A
• Scrutinizer: only A and B type issues
• Pylint: 0 issues
• Remove vendored-in Handlebars, jQuery, jQuery-UI and TableDnD JavaScript libraries in favor of existing npm dependencies
• Front-end uses the existing JSON-RPC instead of backend views that are only used for AJAX requests. Tip: these are usually accessed via postToURL() and jQ.ajax() on the front-end
• Inspect and classify all 3rd party issues reported from Coverity and Bandit. Report and fix what we can, ignore the rest that do not affect Kiwi TCMS.

Redesign the UI templates with the help of Patternfly

There are 59 templates remaining to be converted to a modern look and feel. Along with them comes more refactoring and even redesign of the existing pages and the workflow around them. Together with refactoring this will make Kiwi TCMS easier to use and also to maintain.

Modernize reporting

We are planning to remove the existing reports feature because they are not well designed. We will re-implement existing functionality that our community finds useful, add new types of reports (incl. nicer graphics and UI) and make it possible for the reporting sub-system to be more easily extendable.

Phase out is planned to begin after 1st March 2019! Until then we are looking for your feedback. Please comment in Issue #657!

Plugins for 3rd party test automation frameworks

These will make it easier to collect results from automated test suites into Kiwi TCMS for later analysis. Instead of creating scripts that parse the results and talk to our API you will only have to install an additional package in your test environment and configure the test runner to use it! Automation test results will then appear inside Kiwi TCMS.

• JUnit 5 plugin - already in progress
• TestNG plugin - RFC
• Django plugin - RFC
• py.test plugin - RFC

If you would like to use such functionality leave your vote inside GitHub issues! In case you would like to write a test-runner plugin you can find the specification here.

Redefine bug-tracker integration

Question: Does Kiwi TCMS integrate with JIRA?

Answer: Well, it does. How exactly do you want to integrate?

... silence ...

The following dialog happens every time someone asks me about bug-tracker integration, especially with JIRA. The thing is integration is a specified set of behavior which may or may not be desired in a particular team. As of now Kiwi TCMS is able to open a URL to your bug-tracker with predefined field values, add comments to bug reports and report a simple summary of bugs inside a TestRun.

We recognize this may not be enough and together with the community we really need to define what bug tracker integration means! The broader domain of application lifecycle management tools (of which TCMS is a sub-set) have an integrated bug tracking system. We can add something like this and save you the trouble of using JIRA, however many teams have already invested in integrating their infrastructure or just like other tools. For example we love GitHub issues and our team regularly makes public reports about issues that we find internally!

• Goal: Redefine what bug-tracker integration means, vote in Issue #698
• Goal: Bug-tracker functionality inside Kiwi TCMS, similar to GitHub Issues. Vote in Issue #699
• Goal: Integration with Redmine (per current specification), vote in Issue #41
• Goal: fix existing bugs around bug-tracker integration (per current specification). Vote in Issue #97, Issue #117, Issue #289, Issue #290, Issue #320, Issue #479 and Issue #530

GitHub flow integration

Developers have their GitHub PR flow and if they have done the job of having unit tests then they will merge only when things are green! This leaves additional testing efforts kind of to the side and doesn't really help with transparency and visibility. I'm not going to mention having an automatically deployed staging environment for every change because very few teams actually have managed to do this effectively.

• Goal: Figure out how Kiwi TCMS can integrate with GitHub flow and bridge the gap. Please share and +1 your wildest ideas in Issue #700.
• Follow up: depending on the results in #700 we will follow with other goals and sub-tasks

Agile integration with Trello

Speaking of modern engineering flow is your team truly agile? When and how do you plan your testing activities ? Before the devel sprint or afterwards? How many testers take part in refining product backlog and working on user stories?

Similar to GitHub flow lots of teams and open source projects are using Trello to effectively organize their development process. Testing should not be left behind and Kiwi TCMS may be able to help.

• Goal: Figure out how Kiwi TCMS fits into the overall devel-test-planning process for agile teams and what we can do to make this easier for testers. Please share and +1 your wildest ideas in Issue #701
• Follow up: depending on the results in #701 we will follow with other goals and sub-tasks

Improve engineering productivity

What makes a test engineer productive when they need to assess product risk and new features, when mapping product requirements documents (PRD) to test plans and test cases, when collaborating on user stories and behavior specification ? What makes developers, product owners, designers and other professionals productive when it comes to dealing with testing ?

For example consider the following workflow:

• Company has idea for a new product
• In case this is a big product it may have its own mission, i.e. what kind of problem is it trying to solve and for which group of customers
• Product backlog is then created which outlines features that map to the product mission
• Then the team, together with test engineers perform example mapping and discuss and refine the initial feature requirements. User stories are created
• Behavior specification may also be created
• Test plans and test cases are the immediate product of BDD specs and desired user stories

Later we iterate through the sprints and for each sprint something like this happens:

• Desired product features are planned for development. They must be complete at least in terms of requirements, specs and tests
• Devel writes code, maybe some unit tests, testers can also write automated tests and/or manually verify the current state of the feature being developed
• Testing, including exploratory is performed before feature is merged
• Rinse and repeat

Devel is also part of testing, right? Product owners, UX and interaction designers as well. Producing quality software product is a team effort!

In every step of the way Kiwi TCMS can provide notification wizards, guidelines and/or documentation for best practices, facilitate tooling, e.g. to write user stories and assess them or map out an exploratory testing session, etc. The list of ideas is virtually endless. We can even go into deep learning, AI and blockchain but honestly who knows how to use them in testing ?

Our team is not quite sure how this goal will look like 3 months from now but we are certain that testing needs to happen first, last and all the time during the entire software development lifecycle. By providing the necessary functionality and tools in Kiwi TCMS we can boost engineering productivity and steer the testing process in your organization into a better, more productive direction which welcomes participation from all engineering groups.

Let's consider another point of view: testing is a creative activity which is benefited by putting your brain into a specific state of mind! For example Gherkin (the Given-When-Then language) has the benefit of forcing you to think about behavior and while doing so you are vocalizing the various roles in the system, what kind of actions are accepted and what sort of result is expected! Many times this will help you remember or discover missing scenarios, edge cases and raise even more questions!

Crazy ideas, brain dumps and +1 as always are welcome in Issue #703.

Community

Coding alone is not fun! Here's what you can do to help us:

• Become a stargazer by clicking the Star button on our GitHub repository
• Follow @KiwiTCMS on Twitter
• Subscribe to our newsletter - we are GDPR compliant and we don't spam, we promise!
• Vote with a +1 reaction on GitHub issues (top-right corner)
• Send us testimonials and feedback about using Kiwi TCMS. We will be happy to publish them on our website
• Send us a pull request on GitHub
• Become a sponsor!

We are also looking to expand our core team and the list of occasional contributors. The following are mostly organizational goals:

• Goal: participate in 5 conferences with a project stand
• Goal: define how we find, recruit and onboard new team members. The foundation is already set in TP-3
• Goal: clearly mark GitHub issues which are suitable for external contributors which don’t want to spend lots of time learning how Kiwi TCMS works under the hood. We're going to tag all such issues with the label

Development policy

Our team will be working on areas related to the goals above. A +1 reaction on GitHub issues will help us prioritize what we work on!

Bug fixes and other issues will be occasionally slipped into the stream and pull requests from non-team contributors will be reviewed and merged in a timely fashion.

There is at least 1 full day of work that goes behind the scenes when a new version is officially released: compile changelog, build images and upload them, create blog post and newsletter announcement, share on social media, etc. We also deploy on our own Kiwi TCMS instance as a stop-gap measure before making everything public!

New PyPI tarballs and Docker images will be released every few weeks as we see fit, this has been our standard process. We try to align releases with Django's release schedule and try to cut a new version when there are known security vulnerabilities fixed. However we can't guarantee this will always be the case!

If you are in a hurry and need something quickly the best option is to send a pull request, build your own Docker image from source and maybe consider sponsoring us via Open Collective!

Happy testing!

Hello everyone, in this article I will outline the progress that the Kiwi TCMS team has made towards achieving the goals in our 2018 roadmap (mid-year update here). TLDR; goals are completed at 62%. Refactoring legacy code is showing good results, less so on the front-end side and there are items still in progress!

Make code easier to maintain

Status: good progress

Initially CodeClimate reported a "D" rating with 600+ code smells and 600+ duplications and a 1 year estimation to resolve these. We're now down to "C" rating with 171 smells and 203 duplications.

The level of technical debt has dropped from 32.5% down to 17.7% and we have removed around 14000 lines of Python code and 8000 lines of JavaScript code without losing significant functionality.

Checkout the stats for more info!

Use pylint and pylint-django

Status: almost finished

Both pylint and pylint-django have been integrated into our CI workflow. There are even some custom built plugins that we use. The number of issues reported is down to 100 from 4000+ initially. These are predominantly fixme comments which are also in parts of the code that are scheduled for removal and refactoring.

Render HTML, return JSON

Status: moderate progress

Several views were modified to return pure JSON but we've not done any targeted work to resolve this issue. A number of other views have been removed in favor of using the existing JSON-RPC layer.

This is an internal refactoring effort which isn't very visible from the outside. This is also one of the factors contributing to the high number of removed source code.

Submit forms, post JSON, GET clean URLs

Status: no progress

Not much has been done in this area except the occasional refactoring to JSON-RPC.

API layer

Status: complete

Documentation

Status: moderate progress, dropped

All RPC methods have been documented! The rest of the internals will be documented as we go along.

No vendored JavaScript libraries

Status: good progress

We still carry around jQuery, jQuery-UI and Handlebars.js. They will be removed once the pages using them are converted to use the Patternfly widgets library.

Less HTML templates with better organization

Status: moderate progress

There are still over 50 HTML templates in tcms/templates/ that need to be refactored into Patternfly. We've been working on them one at a time and will focus more on this effort in the next couple of months.

Modern interface with Patternfly

Status: moderate progress

Some of the pages have been converted to use Patternfly. The most important pages that still have a different look and feel are TestPlan view, TestCase view and TestRun view. These are also the hardest to convert because they have lots of tabs/components which pull information from various places. Our goal is to create reusable widgets for the various components (e.g. a list of TestCases) and then include these components into several different templates to minimize code duplication.

JavaScript updates and front-end testing

Status: moderate progress

A number of JavaScript functions have been refactored and removed during the past few releases but there are still thousands of lines of code left to deal with. This effort is mostly happening in parallel with the Patternfly redesign. We still don't have anything to test front-end JavaScript functionality!

Community efforts

Status: good progress

We are seeing a steady stream of new users registered on https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org and there are several active contributors on GitHub. Most of our translators are very active and keep their respective languages fresh and up to date!

Kiwi TCMS was represented at OSCAL Tirana, DjangoCon Heidelberg, PyCon Prague, HackConf Sofia, PiterPy St. Petersburg and OpenFest Sofia. We've also been approved for a project stand at FOSDEM 2019 so watch this blog for more news.

Happy testing!

I am happy to announce that our team is steadily growing! As we work through our roadmap, status update here, and on-board new team members I start to feel the need for a bit more structure and organization behind the scenes. I also wish for consistent contributions to the project (commit early, commit often) so I can better estimate the resources that we have!

I am also actively discussing Kiwi TCMS with lots of people at various conferences and generate many ideas for the future. The latest SEETEST in Belgrade was particularly fruitful. Some of these ideas are pulling into different directions and I need help to keep them under control!

Development-wise sometimes I lose track of what's going on and who's doing what between working on Kiwi TCMS, preparing for conferences and venues to promote the project, doing code review of other team members, trying not to forget to check-in on progress (especially by interns), recruiting fresh blood and thinking about the overall future of the project. Our user base is growing and there are days where I feel like everything is happening at once or that something needs to be implemented ASAP (which is usually true anyway)!

Meet Rayna Stankova in the role of our team coach! Reny is a director for Women Who Code Sofia, senior QA engineer at VMware, mentor with CoderDojo Bulgaria and a long-time friend of mine. Although she is an experienced QA in her own right she will be contributing to the people side of Kiwi TCMS and less so technically!

Her working areas will be planning and organization:

• help us (re)define the project vision and goals
• work with us on roadmaps and action plans so we can meet the project goals faster
• help us (self) organize so that we are more efficient, including checking progress and blockers (aka enforcer) and meet the aforementioned consistency point
• serve as our professional coach, motivator and somebody who will take care of team health (yes I really suck at motivating others)

and generally serving as another very experienced member of the team!

We did a quick brainstorming yesterday and started to produce results (#smileyface)! We do have a team docs space to share information (non-public for now, will open it gradually as we grow) and came up with the idea to use Kiwi TCMS as a check-list for our on-boarding/internship process!

I don't know how it will play out but I do expect from the team to self-improve, be inspired, become more focused and more productive! All of this also applies to myself, even more so!

Existing team members progress

Last year we started with 2 existing team members (Tony and myself) and 3 new interns (Ivo, Kaloyan and Tseko) who built this website!

Tony is the #4 contributor to Kiwi TCMS in terms of number of commits and is on track to surpass one of the original authors (before Kiwi TCMS was forked)! He's been working mostly on internal refactoring and resolving the thousands of pylint errors that we had (down to around 500 I think). This summer Tony and I visited the OSCAL conference in Tirana and hosted an info booth for the project.

Ivo is the #5 contributor in terms of numbers of commits. He did learn very quickly and is working on getting rid of the remaining pylint errors. His ability to adapt and learn is quite impressive actually. Last month he co-hosted a git workshop at HackConf, a 1000+ people IT event in Sofia.

Kaloyan did most of the work on our website initially (IIRC). Now he is studying in the Netherlands and not active on the project. We are working to reboot his on-boarding and I'm hoping he will find the time to contribute to Kiwi TCMS regularly.

From the starting team only Tseko decided to move on to other ventures after he contributed to the website.

Internship program

At Kiwi TCMS we have a set of training programs that teach all the necessary technical skills before we let anyone actively work on the project, let alone become a team member.

Our new interns are Denitsa Uzunova and Desislava Koleva. Both of them are coming from Vratsa Software Community and were mentors at the recently held CodeWeek hackathon in their home city! I wish them fast learning and good luck!

Happy testing!

We are happy to announce that OpenFest - the biggest open source conference in Bulgaria has provided an info booth for our project. This year the event will be held on 3rd and 4th of November at Sofia Tech Park!

Last time the team went to a conference together we had a lot of fun! Join us at OpenFest to learn more about Kiwi TCMS and have fun with us!

#KiwiTCMS is at #hackconf #HC18. Find @atodorov_ and @ivo0926 if you want to talk #opensource #test case management! pic.twitter.com/ioRCnds7jY

— Kiwi TCMS (@KiwiTcms) September 15, 2018

@KiwiTcms at @HackConf_ day 2. Find me or @atodorov_ if you want to talk about open source test case management system #opensource #tcms #kiwitcms pic.twitter.com/OGsj0Z9Dww

— Anton Sankov (@a_sankov) September 16, 2018

In case you are unable to visit Sofia, which you totally should, you can catch up with us in Russia until the end of the year:

• PiterPy, 2nd-3rd November, St. Petersburg - where Alex Todorov will talk about pylint plugins and how we use them inside Kiwi TCMS
• Heisenbug, 6th-7th December, Moscow - where Alex will talk about tools and methods that we use to make Kiwi TCMS more secure

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

Hello everyone, in this article I will outline the progress that the Kiwi TCMS team has made towards achieving the goals on our roadmap.

Make code easier to maintain

Status: moderate progress

Initially CodeClimate reported a "D" rating with a 1 year estimated effort. Now it is still on "D" rating with a 7 months estimated effort to bring the project back in shape. Code smells have dropped from 600+ to 418, duplications have been reduced from 600+ to 359! At the same time technical debt ratio has been decreased from 32,5% to 21,6% and little over 10000 lines of code have been removed from the source code. Checkout the stats for more info!

Use pylint and pylint-django

Status: good progress

Both pylint and pylint-django have been integrated into our CI workflow. There are even a few custom built plugins that we use. The number of issues reported is down to around 900 from 4000+ initially. The cleanup has been lead by Anton Sankov with help from Ivaylo Ivanov and myself.

Render HTML, return JSON

Status: no progress

Several views were probably modified to return pure JSON in the meantime but we've not done any targeted work to resolve this issue.

Submit forms, post JSON, GET clean URLs

Status: no progress

Same as above, not much has been done in this area.

API layer

Status: complete

After Kiwi TCMS v4.0 the server side API has been reorganized and updated to follow the model/method names used internally.

After the recent version 5.0 the client side API library has been stripped to its most basic form so that you can work directly with the responses from the server.

There is no more duplication and ambiguity in names because there isn't a lot of code left!

Documentation

Status: moderate progress, dropped

All RPC methods have been documented! The rest of the internals will be documented as we go along.

No vendored JavaScript libraries

Status: moderate progress

Several JavaScript libraries have been removed but we still carry around jQuery and Handlebars.js. No work has been done to convert Kiwi TCMS to use the jQuery version provided with Django.

Less HTML templates with better organization

Status: minimal progress

There are still over 100 HTML templates in Kiwi TCMS. Some of the HTML templates have been merged together, some email templates have been refactored and marked as translatable but the majority of them have not been updated for a long time.

Modern interface with Patternfly

Status: no progress

JavaScript updates and front-end testing

Status: small progress

A number of JavaScript functions have been refactored and removed during the past few releases but there are still thousands of lines of code left to deal with.

Community efforts

Status: moderate progress

We are seeing a steady stream of new users registered on https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org and there are several active contributors (issues, translations).

Kiwi TCMS was represented at OSCAL Tirana, DjangoCon Heidelberg and PyCon Prague! We're planning to attend HackConf and OpenFest in Sofia by the end of the year.

Happy testing!

Kiwi TCMS is going on a small conference tour. This is where you can find us in the next couple of months:

• Bulgaria Web Summit - 14 April, Sofia
• OSCAL - 19 & 20 May, Tirana
• DjangoCon Europe - 23-27 May, Heidelberg

For all of the 3 conferences we're going to have a project presence. In addition to that you can catch-up with Alex Todorov, Kiwi's project lead at: TestCon Moscow(17-19 April, Moscow), Romanian Testing Conference(9-11 May, Cluj-Napoca), PyCon CZ(1-3 June, Prague) and DEVit(10-11 June, Thessaloniki).

If you can ping us at @KiwiTCMS or look for the kiwi bird logo and come to say hi!

Hello everyone. As you know Kiwi TCMS has been around for a while and it has gone through some big changes in the last year! It started as an abandoned Django 1.6 project with broken test suite and is now currently running on the latest Django 2.0.1 with Python 3.5! It is clearly a legacy code base!

We, the Kiwi TCMS team, have learned a lot more about the project and this blog post describes our roadmap for 2018 in terms of technical work and community engagement. The general technical direction is cleaner/simpler code, improved UI/UX and more tests!

Make code easier to maintain

The current code is a bunch of very large modules and functions and classes bundled together. It is also old and sometimes looks like spaghetti code. CodeClimate gives us a "D" rating for maintainability with a 1 year estimated effort to fix that. There are 600+ code smells and 600+ duplications detected by CodeClimate. Our goal is to get this number down to zero!

Use pylint and pylint-django

pylint is the standard static analyzer for Python and currently it reports over 4000 errors and warnings when executed against Kiwi TCMS. This is a huge number and it needs to become zero! We've also identified interesting patterns that will make it into pylint and pylint-django plugins!

Render HTML, return JSON

The current state of affairs is a mix and match of everything. There are views that render HTML, others which return pure JSON, other which return HTML encoded as JSON string and probably everything in between. Views that render pages need to do just that and views that are used with AJAX calls from the UI need to return pure JSON! A lot of these are hiding in plain sight and will come to light when we start overhauling the user interface.

Submit forms, post JSON, GET clean URLs

There are lots of forms in Kiwi TCMS. Sometimes they are submitted by the user and other times they are serialized and POSTed by some JavaScript code. This isn't very easy to understand plus this entire home-grown utility code doesn't bring anything useful to the project. All of these need to be identified and cleaned up. JavaScript code needs to send or consume JSON, nothing else!

There are also lots of places where Kiwi issues GET requests with a number of query parameters. Our goal is to minimize these and where possible have the parameters as part of the Django urls scheme, not as query strings.

API layer

The current API module is a bit disorganized. API namespaces don't match the names of the underlying DB models and the API client classes don't match any of the other two! The way we pass parameters and what these parameters are named should match between the client, the RPC method and the underlying model!

In earlier releases we've removed duplicate or similar RPC methods and we think there are more of these that need our love.

Documentation

We've started producing documentation from doc-strings and most of the RPC methods have such. However it is unformatted and barely readable, sometimes even inaccurate. Previous releases made progress on this but there's a lot more to cover.

All RPC methods should be documented first and then the rest of Kiwi's internals to make development easier!

No vendored JavaScript libraries

There are 11 vendored-in JavaScript files that we carry around in Kiwi TCMS. Most notable are jQuery plus a few addons and Handlebars.js. To the extent possible our goal is to use jQuery provided by Django or installed via NPM dependencies!

Less HTML templates with better organization

There are over 100 HTML templates in Kiwi TCMS. There are also email and even JavaScript templates. For example there are get_cases.html and get_review_cases.html which are essentially the same. This is kind of also true for templates used in new and edit views! Such templates should be unified!

Those JavaScript templates need to be totally gone!

All templates are stuffed together in a single directory and their names are not very predictable. They need to be split per application and follow some kind of naming convention.

Modern interface with Patternfly

The UI already uses the Patternfly library for some of its widgets. Most notably the main navigation header. Our goal is for the entire UI to be ported to Patternfly by updating widgets HTML and CSS where needed. This will also help clean things up a lot. At the same time we'll be rethinking how information is organized on screen and how the person interacts with it! Usability suggestions are very welcome!

This move will also help us get rid of the Handlebars dependency which is now used for pop-up dialogs.

JavaScript updates and front-end testing

There's lots of JavaScript code on the front-end and honestly we don't quite know what it does or how it is organized. There are also no tests on the front-end whatsoever!

It is our goal for this to change with the intention to not overdo the JavaScript part and keep things very minimal. At the moment we're thinking about vanilla jQuery that will act as a proxy between the browser and the back-end!

Community efforts

A year ago hardly anybody knew what Kiwi TCMS was, the project didn't even have this name, there was 1 active contributor and hardly any users! Now the community has started to slowly revitalize, we're seeing some contributions from our junior team members (more on this in another blog post) and also seeing folks installing and using Kiwi TCMS and reporting interesting bugs and feature requests around it!

For the upcoming year our goal is to seek active engagement with other open source projects that could make use of Kiwi TCMS and work with them. Kudos to openSUSE for being the first to propose such integration! We're also planning couple of appearances at a few conferences but there's nothing confirmed yet.

Every other contribution in terms of bug reports, new users and feature requests is of course welcome but we're very conscious of the fact that there's tons of work to be done and the team is still very small!

Team wise we'd like to get the existing team members up to speed and tackle the above tasks with priority. This will also help us introduce bug fixes and new features more quickly!

Happy testing!