Let’s be clear about what this is and what it isn’t.
A typical openSUSE Tumbleweed installation has roughly 2,600 ELF executables in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin (more or fewer depending on the installation pattern). Our test repository has 2,343 test modules. We measure coverage on 141 of those binaries using 98 of those test modules. That’s a fraction of the whole picture and we’re not claiming this is the total test coverage of the distribution.
Back when I was working at Canonical on the Ubuntu phone project, test-driven development was the default and natural way to work. One thing I noticed and genuinely liked was how Ubuntu and Debian ship functional tests alongside many of their packages. Not only build-time unit tests hidden in the CI pipeline, but installable test binaries that you can run against the actual packages on an actual system. They are named *-tests or *-test, and they live in the archive next to the production packages.
The views expressed in this post are my own and do not represent the position of my employer. This post is not a commercial endorsement of QASE or any of its products.
I very seldom write about proprietary solutions and software. Not because I have any problem with them, but simply because I usually prefer open source solutions, and during my daily work and hobby projects I use almost exclusively open source software.
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