Making auto-testing easier

If you are a contributor to Qt, you should know by now that your patches must not cause any regressions.  The auto-tests in Qt (located in <QTDIR>/tests/auto) are there to ensure that. These tests are run automatically by the Qt Continuous Integration System before merging a staging branch into the mainline.

As a contributor, before submitting a merge request on Gitorious, you should always run locally the auto-tests related to what you are changing to simplify the reviewer's job. For instance, if you are patching something in QGraphicsView, you should compile and run individually 19 different auto-tests (the ones starting with 'qgraphics'). If you are used to that, you probably think that it is not the most pleasant and fast thing to do...

Well, let me introduce you Qt Autotester:

This handy little tool (that was used only internally until now) will help you in this process by making it a lot more simpler. Basically, you just select a set of auto-tests then the tool makes everything for you: it compiles, runs and shows you the results in a nice way.

• You can manage several versions of Qt, save a set of auto-tests in a profile and export the results.
• It is of course cross-platform.
• You can remotely run the auto-tests on a Symbian device if you are developing on Windows (it automatically does that if Qt is built for Symbian).