On October 18th, 2007, Chad Phillips (hummonk) made an initial commit to the ‘Project Issue File Test’ module, with the description “initial commit of an integrated file testing platform for project issue module”. This kicked off the pursuit of automated testing integration between drupal.org and qa.d.o (then referred to as testing.drupal.org). In 2009, Jimmy Berry (boombatower) performed a significant overhaul and redesign of the system with the release of PIFT/PIFR 2.0, introducing a number of structural and architectural changes and improvements.
By the time Drupal 8 is launched, we’ll have been running for 5 years on the current architecture, and almost 6½ years on the project. In that time it has served us well; but unfortunately the code has not kept up with technology and the changing needs of the Drupal community. The D8 launch brings with it a host of new requirements, such as an urgent need to test against PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5; while simultaneously supporting PHP 5.3 for legacy D6/D7 contrib projects.
This October, at the BADCamp devops summit, we held a short workshop to discuss the architecture and operation of the current Drupal.org Automated Testing infrastructure, as well as to review a proposed 'future state' architecture for the platform. This session will provide an overview of that proposed architecture, information on new features and performance improvements that it is expected to introduce, and a status report on progress to date.
