After using the kitchen-openstack driver plugin I was frustrated by the lack of a private key parameter in the kitchen-rackspace plugin. I could specify a public key to create my VM with but I had no way to tell the plugin what private key to use. After reading the code (
https://github.com/test-kitchen/kitchen-rackspace/blob/master/lib/kitchen/driver/rackspace.rb) I found that I simply needed to use an expected name for my public key like '~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub' and the driver figures out to use '~/.ssh/id_rsa' as the private key.
Also, '--log-level' switch is pretty handy. Try '--log-level debug' for a lot of extra info.