The 2nd Google Test Automation Conference will take place in New York on 23rd and 24th of August. I’ve been given the honor of presenting our team’s test automation system that’s in use for all F-Secure’s Linux/UNIX Anti-Virus products. The conference is free of charge, but the number of participants is limited to 150. If you’re working with testing or test automation you have a good change to see my presentation and many top speakers during the two days by applying to the conference here.

My presentation will introduce some ideas of test automation system architecture, using virtualization to test on ever increasing number of Linux variants, utilizing version control and moving to automated reporting and test documentation. I’ll be also covering some specifics of testing anti-virus products, testing proprietary products on open source platforms and testing products with GUIs, Web UIs, kernel modules and firewalls as well as HTTP/SMTP/POP proxies with clients and servers. And even bootable CDs. It’s quite clear that there isn’t a single free or commercial product that would do all that. So I’ll show how we have tackled many of these problems by modularity of the automation system and by keeping all the different parts easy to use and understand. And oh yes… I’ll be advocating “automating everything” :)

As mentioned by Alexey, currently the International Antivirus Testing Workshop is ongoing in Reykjavík, Iceland, and I am here representing the F-Secure Linux team. Here I am learning everything there is to know about malware testing, and, of course, enjoying the amazing nature of Iceland and the charming city of Reykjavík - yesterday we visited the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa.

Some of us has recently become addicted to Twitter. As I discovered that someone has already made a Net::Twitter Perl module, the natural extension of this lunacy was to integrate Twitter support into our LED sign. We created a common Twitter account, to which we added as friends all the team members that wished to participate. With just a few lines of Perl code, we then got our tweets prominently displayed on the team LED sign. Pure Web 2.0 goodness!

my $twit = Net::Twitter->new(username=>"foo", password=>"bar" );
my @seentweets;

sub fetchtwits() {

    my $timeline = $twit->friends_timeline();

    my $firsttime = @seentweets ? 0 : 1;

    return "" unless $timeline;
    TWEET: for (@{$timeline}) {
	my %tweet = %{$_};
	if ($firsttime) {
	    # if this is the first time we're running, just
	    # populate the seen list with all tweets so that
	    # we don't spew out the whole timeline on startup
	    push @seentweets, $tweet{'id'};
	}

	for (@seentweets) {
	    if ($_ eq $tweet{'id'}) {
		next TWEET;
	    }
	}
	my %user = %{$tweet{'user'}};
	my $msg = '<GD1>' . $user{'screen_name'} . ": " . $tweet{'text'};

	print "new tweet: " . $msg . " [" .$tweet{'id'} . "]\n";
	toled('A', $msg);
	push @seentweets, $tweet{'id'};
	return $msg;
    }

    return "";

}