The open-source launch of Chrome OS was announced today, and the source is available to download and build
http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os. The entire project, including testing, is being open-sourced and made available for scrutiny and to help others to both contribute and learn from our experiences.
The test engineering team haven't been idle - we're a small, international team and as a result we're having to be innovative in terms of our testing so we maximize our contribution to the project. We had two goals: to take care of short-term release quality and to plan an automation infrastructure that will serve the operating system for many years in the future.
Currently we're combining manual and automated testing to achieve these goals. The manual testing provides fast feedback while we're extending the use of test automation to optimize future testing. In terms of test automation, we're using a collection of open-source tools such as:
There are some interesting plans and ideas afoot on how to significantly increase the testability and accessibility of Chrome OS - watch for future blog posts on these topics in the coming months!
We have used various approaches to design our tests, including 'tours' (mentioned in various posts on this blog). We are also applying the concept of 'attack surface' used in security testing more generally to determine what to test, from both technical and functional perspectives.
For the launch we devised the 'early-adopters tour'; where we validated the open source build and installation instructions on a collection of netbooks purchased from local stores (we expect many of you will want to build and run Chrome OS on similar machines).
If you're one of the early adopters - have fun building, installing and running Chrome OS and post your comments and ideas here. We hope you enjoy using Chrome OS as much as we're enjoying testing it!