Upstream Taks: https://github.com/operator-framework/operator-controller/issues/1990

Description

The objective of this epic is to establish the necessary mechanisms to centralize end-to-end (e2e) tests in the upstream environment—except in cases where downstream-specific features require dedicated coverage.

By aligning test coverage upstream, we aim to:

• Improve overall coverage across both upstream and downstream, since upstream tests are also executed downstream.

• Reduce maintenance overhead, streamlining our workflows and minimizing duplicated effort.

• Simplify ongoing development and testing, especially around OCP release cycles.

Additionally, we intend to cover test scenarios involving mock data and sample content within the repository itself. This will eliminate the need for externally managed repositories created solely to test these scenarios, which historically end up stale and not properly maintained.

Moreover, we often face issues when new OCP releases are made and we cannot bump the default catalog images because the Operator content used in our e2e tests is not yet available.

This effort is also expected to ease the process of integrating and validating the five required Feature Gate tests in openshift/origin, helping reduce the burden associated with maintaining those test requirements. However, we are not covering that work here—it would be part of Phase 2, and the effort tracked in this epic is a prerequisite for that future phase.

Why is it important:

To try to avoid the following situations:

• Having E2E tests downstream that could live upstream
• Keeping “outstanding” sample repos that go stale and aren’t really useful long term
• Duplicating effort just to test the same things in multiple places (adds no value, only maintenance overhead)
• Making it hard to maintain things due to lack of automation
• Spreading tests across too many repos, making it hard to understand where something fails