Fund python testing sprint for new pytest/tox releases
Are you or your company using pytest or tox and want it to advance and get new features and better maintenance? People from several continents together have spent thousands of hours to bring you the best in python testing and are now asking for funding of expenses for their sprint June 20-26th 2016 in Freiburg, Germany. It would be the largest and longest sprint gathering of pytest and tox contributors in history!
Here is a preliminary selection of topics:
- improvements to pytest's fixture and parametrization system. Refactoring the fixture system so that more people understand it. Adding more caching scopes.
- improve tox to provide an API that can be used by tests to provide a higher level of configurable functional testing.
-
advance the xdist distributed testing plugin, allowing to run faster by determining the way how tests are distributed by looking at fixtures, allow user hints, policies.
- teach pytest to directly work with tox environments and to remotely set up test hosts using zero-install concepts which only require a login method and a python interpreter install.
- further automating the release process and plugin testing, reducing the time it takes to bring bug fixes and new features to everyone. We'd like to get to the point where releasing is done with a button :)
And of course there will be many more topics that people bring to the sprint.
The sprint will accelerate and enrich the release of pytest 3.0 and yes, it will be much more compatible to pytest 2.X than python3 was to python2 :)
Who participates in the sprint? Who else?
Here is a preliminary break down of who is likely to come:
- Andreas Pelme, Sweden
- Brianna Laugher, Australia
- Bruno Oliveira, Brazil
- Florian Bruhin, Switzerland
- Floris Bruynooghe, UK
- Holger Krekel, Germany
- Omar Kohl, Germany
- Raphael Pierzina, US/UK
- Tom Viner , UK
The sprint is open for more people!
Other contributors and experienced newcomers are invited to join as well. Please
send a mail to the pytest-dev mailing list at python.org if you intend to do so
somewhat soon, also how much funding you need if so.
The sprint is open for professionals from companies!
If you are working for a company and using pytest or tox heavily you are welcome to join and we encourage your company to provide some funding for the
sprint and also fund your travels. They may see it, and rightfully so, as a very cheap and deep training which brings you together with the experts in the field :)
Free software isn't free
Free and open source software is built from volunteer efforts of many people, and pytest and tox are no exception. Pytest has quite a large contributor base, but "tox" (a test standardization tool that supports many test runners, not just pytest) is not so lucky. We hope that the sprint will help to grow more community around the tox project, which is comparatively simple, yet important
to the python community.
Many individuals and businesses rely on open source software which gives
them a huge head start over writing their own libraries from scratch.
Funding for open source is difficult, as recently highlighted by Nadia Eghbal.
This is an opportunity for pytest and tox users to show their
appreciation, while helping the most advanced testing tools go even
further.
What do we need? What do you get?
Contributors will not be paid for sprint attendance but get reimbursements of expenses. We currently expect travel and accommodation costs to sum up at around 11K USD and this includes a few more yet unknown people in addition to the ones already listed above. We are going for cheap or private accommodation and economy travel costs.
The sprint will result in accelerated new releases of pytest, its pytest-xdist and other plugins and also new features of tox, the virtualenv-based test configuration tool. The sprint will certainly result in a shared vision and better understanding between the maintainers of the tools and plugins.
Any excess funding will be used for further sprints or other goals agreed by the maintainers. If we get less funding than needed we'll see to make it happen anyway.
If your company prefers to pay according to an invoice rather than through Indiegogo please contact Holger (the founder of pytest) at merlinux.eu who has handled many international contracts and will channel the money to the sprint.
All supporters will be offered to be credited on the sprint page and, when we get it up, on the blog. If you or your organisation gives more than a thousand euros we are going to listen very carefully to your particular needs and priorities regarding further pytest developments and make them part of the sprint.
We expect the sprint to greatly accelerate and improve the release of pytest-3.0 and major plugin revisions as well as new tox releases and features.
Communities and Histories
The pytest open source project started back in 2003/2004 and grew in features in conjunction of growing a massive test suite for PyPy, the Just-In-Time compiler for python. It has since been adopted by thousands of other projects and companies. It currently has more than half a million downloads per month on PyPI. Since 2009 it features a unique plugin system, which has been published as "pluggy" with over 200 plugins available and an active roughly 10-people maintainer group. The plugin system has a very good track record of enabling compatibility even though many big changes took place in the core.
Guiding pytest ideas like "no API is the best API" have spread to Javascript's power-assert project. pytest's unique fixture system goes far beyond what can be done with traditional xUnit-style setup methods. Twelve years after its inception, pytest is a more active and thriving project than ever and doing a dedicated longer sprint meetup with most core people will certainly catalyse further improvements.
The open source "tox" tool was created in 2010 by Holger Krekel to provide a higher level "test automation runner" which is today used by thousands of projects with different test runners. It gets more than 300K downloads on PyPI per month. While it received a lot of substantial Pull Requests from various people, it does not have a broad core maintainer group. The sprint should help to facilitate a community around tox.
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Freiburg in the black forest, where the sprint will take place 20-26th June 2016. (image copyrighted by wikimedia commons, CC licensed)
