And then, ATS4

When I lasted posted, I had no real idea when ATS4 – the next major release of Nokia’s Automated Test System – might break cover. I said “sometime later this year or early next”.  But it broke cover last week.

I’ve been keen to see this and keen to move on from ATS3 in our testing operations, because ATS4 is the release with which ATS goes open source and becomes eligible for distribution to Symbian members and contributors. As an almost inevitable corollary, it also goes multi-platform to Linux as well as Windows:  this would be a Linux public debut for the ATS team.  ATS is a solution for the large-scale tester, not the lone contributor, but most Symbian members are organisations that will likely have a use for a large-scale testing solution.  If we can offer them one that we use in Symbian there’s a big synergy there, and that adds merit to ATS for me.

The manner in which ATS4 made its appearance took me by surprise, as well as the timing. ATS3 releases have reached me by sneaker-net. Nokia drop them on an internal FTP server in Finland. A Nokia test engineer in Friars House, Blackfriars Road, London, downloads the release to upgrade his own test network. Then as a favour, he copies it to a USB stick and walks across the road to the gittering Symbian Symplex and delivers it to me.  21st century or what? I thought I’d get my first sight of ATS4 the same way; but when I last enquired about its ETA, my Nokian contact told me it would be on Sourceforge, and that some was already there.

And so it was.  This made me think that the ATS team had maybe raised its open-source game more sharply than I’d reckoned with.

The bit that’s already on Sourceforge isn’t a bit that I was after. It’s a new bit. ATS4, I read in the Sourceforge posting, has become “the Nokia ATS tool family“, and the first family member to appear there is one called ATS4AppModel, billed as “an application flow design tool supporting application specification work, model based testing and test script generation. It provides simple interface to manage complex models.”

This sounds cool and I’ll certainly be giving it a test drive to see what it might do for testing in Symbian, but it’s not the open-source successor to ATS3 that I’ve been waiting for. I enquired again and learned that what I am waiting for is called ATS4Core. ATS4Core looks to be released imminently, because the developers have already got a promissory posting about it on Sourceforge. But the software itself isn’t there yet.

Failing that, I thought I’d try spinning up ATS4AppModel on an Ubuntu 9.04 system just to get the measure of the Linux competence of this first Linux offering from ATS.

There wasn’t any GNU tarball, .deb or .rpm, just a zip archive called ATS4AppModel_2009w24_binaries.zip.  This didn’t look at all au fait with the way software is packaged for Linux. But it extracted as a directory,  ATS4AppModel, that appeared to require no further installation. It contained only 2 platform-dependent files: ATS4AppModel.bat and ATS4AppModel.sh. The former runs the app on Windows; the latter runs it on Linux. Absolutely everything else was platform-independent. All of the code was Java.  Fair enough. The readme.txt said I would need Java JRE 1.6.0 or later, so I installed it from the Sun website, since the packaged JRE for Ubtuntu 9.04 is GNU 1.5.

Unhappily, when I ran ATS4AppModel.sh, things got no further than a class-not-found exception for a Swing class. But when I inspected the script, the problem took only a moment to fix. The script said:

java -jar -Xmx512m ATS4AppModel.jar &

The author had not reckoned with the case – like mine – in which JRE 1.6 is installed, but a pre-existing and older Java is on the PATH.  To be sure of picking up the latest and greatest Java you’ve installed, best rely on the JAVA_HOME environment variable, which on my system was indeed pointing at the Sun JRE 1.6.0 executable. I edited the script to say:

$JAVA_HOME/bin/java -jar -Xmx512m ATS4AppModel.jar &

Then ATS4AppModel started up without further ado and let me noodle around pretending to model an app.

Just one other thing betokened an uncertain grasp of Linux. That & at the end of the end of the launch  command was evidently an attempt to background the Java process and stop it blocking the console in which it was launched. Well, it will background the process but it won’t stop it blocking the console, and there’s no other reason for backgrounding it. I edited the script again to unblock the console:

nohup $JAVA_HOME/bin/java -jar -Xmx512m ATS4AppModel.jar 1>ATS4AppModel-log.txt 2>&1 &

So. ATS4’s open-source debut fumbles a bit with the Linux armature, but religiously portable programming of the payload seems to save the day. Let’s hope this judgement holds good for ATS4Core.