Editing C&I WIki Portal/OCP Checkbox (section)

==OCP Certification==
opencompute-certification is the package name of the next generation Open Compute Certification Test tool.  It is based on a tool called Plainbox, developed by the Hardware Certification team at Canonical.  Essentially, it is a drop-in replacement for OCP Checkbox and the end user should not notice much change.  

===End User Differences===
Mostly, the end user will notice that the menuing system is better, the options for picking tests and suites are improved, as is job handling, runtime output, logging and results output.  

===Developer Differences===
The Test Developer will see some more difference, but again, the difference should not be overwhelming.
* Plainbox honors the same job definition format that Checkbox does.  It adds several new definition items that are entirely optional
* Plainbox honors the same whitelist format.  It also includes better parsing and handling of regexs in whitelists.  Additionally, the long list of "resource" jobs has been replaced with a single job, making whitelist development a bit easier.
* Plainbox still runs anything you ask it too, be it Python, C, C++, Bash, Perl, Go, etc).  Anything that needs to be compiled is compiled per architecture during packaging so the end user will never see a difference in that respect. 
* Plainbox provides better output.  XML, HTML and XLSX is available
* Plainbox adds better built in unit testing ability (This is not currently active in the codebase, but can be added in)
* The package hierarchy is different and will be explained below in more detail.

===About the Tools===
As of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Checkbox has been deprecated in favor of a new generation test harness called Plainbox.  Because of this, the last version of OCP Checkbox is 1.17.4.  Going forward, this code is in Maintenance/Bug Fix only mode and will not receive any major updates.  OCP Checkbox is still perfectly valid for testing use but will be replaced in the future by a plainbox based test tool.  The difference to the tester will be minor, though for the developer, the difference will be great.

The development focus going forward is on the new Plainbox based test tool also stored on Launchpad.  There are currently two packages necessary:
;opencompute-certification : Provides the launcher and ensures the necessary package dependencies are installed
;plainbox-provider-opencompute-testing : Provides OCP Specific whitelists and test scripts, job definitions and other data for testing
;plainbox-provider-checkbox : Provides the generic test scripts and job descriptions.  This is the exact same package used by Canonical Hardware Certification, and thus is considered an upstream package for opencompute-certification.
;plainbox-provider-resource-generic : Provides resource jobs and scripts and libraries necessary to ascertain system hardware inventory and system specific data.  This too is the exact same package used by Canonical Hardware Certification and thus is considered an upstream package.
;checkbox-ng : The underlying test harness based on Plainbox.  This is also the exact package used by Canonical Certification.

The design relies heavily on the existing, current Canonical packages because it is far easier to maintain just the provider and launcher packages necessary for OCP while reusing existing, well maintained tools underneath.  It avoids having to maintain an active fork and further avoids issues with forking the fork causing an irreconcilable delta when updates and bug fixes are necessary.

For rare occasions where a fork IS necessary, it can be more gracefully handled.

Additionally, the design allows the easy ability to spin off new providers or launchers as necessary to create custom tailored test packages for each OCP Project or Platform. (Imagine opencompute-certification-winterfell and opencompute-certification-leopard and opencompute-storage-certification-knox)

This will change slightly as development progresses.

Developer level documentation can be found here:
;[http://checkbox.readthedocs.org CheckBox-NG]
;[http://plainbox.readthedocs.org PlainBox]

Keep in mind that the documentation is developer focused, not user focused, and is also actively developed and thus could change in the future.