After a lot of work, waiting, staging, and such I am proud to announce the addition of contributed projects to the automated testing system. Contributed projects may now take advantage of the same system that Drupal core developers have been using for over a year with great success. The deployment comes quickly after the recent 2.0 launch in late November of 2009. In addition to adding support for contributed project testing a number of other features have been added, most notably:

• Coder and Coder Tough Love review support.
• General e-mail notifications - the devlist mailing list will get an e-mail when Drupal core breaks.
• A number of UI/workflow improvments on drupal.org.
• Grouping of reviews by type or plugin to make room for a cleaner multiple database testing workflow.
• Additional administrative tools for qa.drupal.org and testing clients.
• Views RSS feed plugin for aggregation of test events and results.

For an example of the test results, please take a look at the current Drupal 7 (HEAD) results or one of our beta contributed project results, such as poormanscron.

What this means for contrib project maintainers

If you choose to enable automated testing on your project(s), you may take advantage of the system in a variety of ways. For those project maintainers that simply make commits without issues, the automated testing system will queue testing of the related branch after each commit. The results will be available on qa.drupal.org; in the future, they will be displayed on project pages. If maintainers choose to use a patch-based workflow and/or receive patches for their project(s), the patches will also be automatically tested.

Since the automated testing system checks for common problems like a patch failing to apply, PHP syntax errors, Drupal installation failure, or test failures, it makes it much quicker to weed out the bad patches from the good ones which, in turn, saves maintainers time. In addition, having the automated testing system helps ensure that any tests written for a project are run and thus increases the value of tests. By increasing the value of tests, we hope this will motivate developers to write tests for their projects.