History

The ideas behind DTF began with an internship I did at IBM where I worked with a very influential and experienced individual by the name of Luis Alves. Without Luis I would have never been introduced to the world of quality engineering and would have never realized my passion for tackling the complex and incomplete problem that testing a product involves. His mentoring through the year and half internship that I did at IBM is invaluable and I hope he'll be satisfied seeing his ideas have made found their way to the open source community. When I left IBM I left with the great ideas we had come up with and started developing DTF at Sun Microsystems to build a tool for testing any distributed or non distributed product from the functional testing level through component testing, system testing, integration testing to performance/load testing.

Development of DTF started off as a testing tool being used at Sun Microsystems back when I (Rodney Gomes) was still working on the Storage Tek 5800. Since then Sun Microsystems released the source code for the Storage Tek 5800 product as well as the testing code that was included with that source under a BSD License. You can find that code here.

Then I started using DTF at Yahoo! when I joined in early 2008 and since then I've been working hard to get DTF into a state that could be used for testing different products and having enough flexibility that others can easily develop their own plugins for the products they're testing while sharing the already existing infrastructure within DTF for managing threads, remote execution, statistics calculations, etc.

Finally in June of 2010 I received the official approval from Yahoo! to put the code up again as the new revamped version of DTF under the same BSD License as before in the hopes that others would find the tool useful and help to make it better for everyone interested in continuing its development.