ISSRE paper on NixOS-based system testing

The paper “Automating System Tests Using Declarative Virtual Machines” (by Sander van der Burg and Eelco Dolstra) has been accepted for presentation at the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2010). It describes how system tests with complex requirements on the environment (such as remote machines, network topologies, system services or root privileges) can be written succinctly using declarative specifications of the machines needed by the test environment. From these specifications we can automatically instantiate (networks of) virtual machines. This is what we use for automated regression testing of NixOS itself. A draft of the paper is available.