Editing C&I Wiki Portal/ToolsDevelopmentGuideline (section)

==== What this provides ====
This is the main project for Canonical's certification tool.  This provides the back-end and underlying support structure as well as some of the general test scripts and jobs.  The following packages make up our use of Checkbox, in order from top to bottom.

===== plainbox-provider-checkbox =====
This package provides the actual checkbox test tools used by Canonical Certification. Many tests in OCP Certification and OCP Ready are based on the jobs, scripts and data in this provider.

===== plainbox-provider-resource-generic =====
This package provides system resource jobs and libraries.  These are used at run-time to gather system information and provide that data to CheckboxNG for job generation, to the results files for system hardware inventory, and to provide the validation that allows certain jobs to run.

To explain that last statement, one job of this is to determine if certain hardware exists, and if that hardware exists, then the jobs that test that hardware are configured and executed.  For example, there is a USB resource that determines if a given motherboard has a USB controller.  If the USB Controller is detected by the USB Resource, then the USB test jobs will be run.  If the USB Resource does NOT detect a USB controller, then the USB jobs will be skipped.

===== python3-checkbox-support =====
This package is an infrastructure package that provides several python3 support libraries that Checkbox needs to run.

===== checkbox-ng =====
This package is the back-end.  It provides Checkbox-NG, the Plainbox based test harness that replaces the old Checkbox tool.  It provides the internals that organize and run all the various test cases, performs all the parsing and heavy work of Certification Testing.