I am posting this gauge the level of interest among the community in forming an open source team to work on an automation harness I am about to make available.

I already have a working POC running at my place of work, but it is not secure enough for production environments. However, I am about to release a more powerful and secure version that is secure enough and offers even more features. I will go into further detail about that later on in this post but in the interest of not wasting anyone's time, here is what I am looking for in the way of people with skills I need:

*) Testers
*) Shell Scripter's (Bash) who can review the code, particularly those with the experience and access to a UNIX environment to make it POSIX compliant. (I am currently developing on Centos). You shouldn't be daunted by the thought of working on a full blown application written in shell either.
*) Project managers with experience in running open source projects.
*) Web masters to put a site together for the project.
*) Code management.
*) Packaging
*) Technical writers for the documentation required.

I would particularly like to hear from anyone with a proven track record in managing an open source project and implementing the processes and procedures required to startup such a venture.

The harness is called MUSE, (Managed Unix Shell Execution) and has the following features:

*) Master - Slave architecture.
*) Plugin code modules.
*) Centralised reporting on master.
*) Automatic report summarisation.
*) Very simple syntax, so shallow learning curve.
*) Agnostic - Will run tools on a distributed cluster of servers that are written in any language, thereby enabling end users to leverage their existing tool sets without refactoring.
*) Event driven, Master and Slave are both implemented as state machines that communicate via a messaging framework.
*) Stateful, current state continuously updated in Sqlite3 databases in master and slave.
*) Secure. Currently implemented via LDAP.
*) Access controlled. Standard NIX user and group mechanisms are used to control who can run what and where.
*) Audited - Everything is recorded internally as well as logged under /var/log/muse.
*) Support for RAD. Feature rich developer tools built in by default but controlled via the access control mechanism mentioned above.

I am currently using the insecure harness to test a Data Warehousing Application in the following areas:

*) Integration testing. Application is distributed across multiple server types.
*) Resilience testing. e.g. Killing processes during data loads, block and unblock ports used by interfaces, consume disc space and memory etc.
*) OAT. Sequencing the upgrade and rollback instructions for operations staff with multiple configurations of distributed servers.

I shall not be releasing the insecure version as it is tightly embedded into my employer's systems and I don't want to waste time anonimising code that I'm not going to release. However the new version is almost ready to share with a team of like minded individuals who would like to be involved in making it generally available.

If you are interested in joining the project then please send me a private message with a potted resume. If I think you are likely to be a help during the early stages of the project, I will ask you for a more formal CV and get in touch with you.

If I think you will be of help later on once the project is set up, I will let you know and keep hold of your details.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Brad