oVirt Gamification–The oVirt Game You Didn’t Know you Were Playing

Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals.

It taps into the basic desires and needs of the users impulses which revolve around the idea of Status and Achievement.

To put it in other words, it is turning day-to-day tasks, the kind you might do at home or work, into a game which you can earn points, badges and compete with other people that are doing the same things.

oVirt & Gamification

You probably didn't know, but this isn't the first time oVirt gamification is being used. A few years ago there was an initiative to use oVirt UI plugins system to add Gamification to the project, there was even a "space invaders" game written and available to play inside oVirt!

So What is New?

The oVirt infra team recently reached out to 'GetBadges', a company which provides 'Gamification as a Service'. Luckily for us, open source projects get to have a free game! So oVirt was rewarded with its own oVirt Open Source Game.

The game works automagically every time you contribute to the project. Current integrations are only active on specific projects like 'ovirt-engine' and Continue reading

oVirt System Tests to the Rescue!—How to Run End-to-End oVirt Tests on Your Patch

Today, when an oVirt developer pushes a patch to review on oVirt Gerrit, various validations are triggered in CI via the 'check-patch' job, as defined by the project maintainers. Usually these jobs includes 'unit-tests', 'db tests', static analysis checks, and even an occasional 'functional test'. While it might seem that it covers alot and gives a good indication that the patch is good to be merged, unfortunately it is not always the case.

The reason it's not enough lies in oVirt's complexity and the fact it's a Virtualization project, which means the only real way to know if your patch didn't break things is to install oVirt and try running a few basic commands, like 'adding host', 'adding vm', 'creating snapshots', and other tasks you can only do if you have a full oVirt system up and running. Here is where OST comes in!

oVirt System Tests

oVirt system tests is a testing framework written in Python, using 'python-nose' and oVirt Python SDK and runs on auto-generated VMs created by Lago. It is used by the oVirt CI to run post merge end-to-end testing that runs on a fully deployed oVirt environment and has been proven to detect multiple regressions Continue reading

CI Please Build—How to build your oVirt project on-demand

All projects in oVirt CI are built today post merge, using the 'build-artifacts' stage from oVirt's CI standards. This ensures that all oVirt projects are built and deployed to oVirt repositories and can be consumed by CI jobs, developers or oVirt users.

However, on some occasions a developer might need to build his project from an open patch. Developers need this capability in order to to examine the effects of their changes on a full oVirt installation before merging those changes. On some cases developers may even want to hand over packages based on un-merged patches to the QE team to verify that a given change will fix some complex issue or to preview a new feature on its early stages of development.

The Current Build Option

Until now, to build rpms from a patch, a developer needed to use a custom Jenkins job, which was only available to ovirt-engine and only for master branch. Another option was to try and build it locally using standard CI 'mock runner.sh' script which will use the same configuration as in CI. For full documentation on how to use 'mock-runner', checkout the Standard CI page.

The New Build Option

To ease Continue reading