Introducing Colin

Announcement

I am pleased to announce the first release of Colin, our integrated testing suite for KwaMoja. This software automatically controls KwaMoja using the libcurl libraries, and compares the results against expected results, outputting the results in a nice web viewable format. The tests can be batch run, so hundreds of tests can be automatically run and their results viewed.

Technical Details

The suite contains a a library of functions for automating a complete KwaMoja session. There is a function to login, to choose an appropriate module, to choose an appropriate menu item, to run any number of options within that option, and to logout. Each step of the way, various tests are run for PHP errors/warnings/notices etc and any of these are recorded. All links in a page are verified to make sure they are not broken. When a page carries out some action against the database the result is verified. More verifications will be put in, software of this kind is never complete.

Output

The output from a Colin session can be viewed through your web browser, and looks like this:

If there are any details clicking on the "Details" link will bring up a new page showing these:

 

This will include any screenshots automatically saved by Colin:

Can I get a Colin of my own?

Yes. Colin is released under the GPL v2.0 license and is obtainable from my github site https://github.com/timschofield/colin

Why Colin?

Why not? It just seemed like a good name to me!

Plagiarism

This page is written in response to the lies that +Phil Daintree has written about me, and spread on the internet. Despite years of searching he has been unable to find anything I have written that is untrue, and he has had to resort to vague generalities, faked emails, and badly fabricated screenshots (you can see the joins if you zoom in using any bit mapped image editor). +Phil Daintree is welcome to make any comments to these pages, as he has done in the past. If I agree with what he says I will amend my writings, if I do not agree I have allowed his comments to stand next to mine so that people can make their own judgements. I have every confidence in the intelligence of readers to make a sensible judgement based on the facts. +Phil Daintree will not allow me the right of reply to any of the lies he has told about me. It seems to me significant that he realises that if people see both sides of the argument they will see through his lies.

In the world of open source software a lot of emphasis must be placed on honesty and trust. You have to be able to trust that when you submit code to the administrator of a project that the code is released under the correct license and that is correctly accredited to you. This accreditation is not a question of ego but of common decency and of honesty.

Whenever code gets added to KwaMoja I go to great lengths to attribute the code to the correct author as can be seen here. 

All the work we do in KwaMoja is made available to the webERP project, however recently the project admin +Phil Daintree has been consistently attributing the work to himself rather than to the actual author.

For instance +Fahad Hatib did some considerable work to remove the $db variable throughout the code base, and I personally made that available to +Phil Daintree.

This work was committed to webERP here. Instead of correctly attributing that work to +Fahad Hatib Phil decided to claim the credit for this work to himself:

Unfortunately this seems to be typical of the recent dishonest behaviour of the leadership of the webERP project.