[QA] [WikimediaMobile] No one cares about browser tests [Re: MobileFrontend QA job]

Fri Apr 3 09:30:52 UTC 2015

Personally, I love them, but more often than not when I run them a few
things happen that make me sad:

   - Tests take too long to run
      - Even on Gather, which doesn't have too many tests, it takes a
      really long time, which discourages running all tests every time.
   - Tests don't block jenkins merges
      - This would be key for me. Do this. Block jenkins. Then we'll be
      forced to make it faster, make better browser tests, and everybody will
      have to care because they will run and block merges.

So there's a few key items that I would love to see:

   - Improve performance (needs magnitudes improvements, a lot of work on
   different fronts)
   - Fully support headless browsers like phantom (they randomly break with
   timeout errors and other problems, but are the faster/painless ways of
   running the tests)
   - Run the browser tests (or a smoke subset) on jenkins patches as a
   voting job. Crucial for making everybody care about the tests and to stop
   regressions.

On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 10:18 PM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Personally, I think one team needs to get this completely right and
> demonstrate the difference e.g. fewer bugs, iterating fast, quicker
> code review time etc..
>
> Talks can come off the back of that.
> The majority of people I speak to seem to advocate a TDD approach but
> I think we don't make life easy enough for them to do that and we lack
> the discipline to do that. We need to work on both of those two.
>
> I'm confident if we do a survey we'll identify and prioritise the pain
> points. For me my top priority would be getting the infrastructure in
> place on all our existing codebases in a consistent way that make
> adding tests effortless and prevent code merging when it breaks those
> tests but there may be more important things we need to sort out
> first!
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 1:16 AM, Sam Smith <samsmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > Dan, Jon,
> >
> > I got caught up in meetings yesterday – you'll see this email a lot
> during
> > Q4 ;) – so I delayed sending this email, so forgive the repetitions of
> some
> > of Dan's points/questions:
> >
> >> Here are a few ways I can think of:
> >>
> >> include feedback on browser tests – or lack thereof – during code review
> >>
> >> make browser test failures even more visible than they currently are –
> but
> >> maybe not the success reports, eh?
> >>
> >> can these reports be made to point at a bunch of candidate changes that
> >> may have broken 'em?
> >>
> >> hold a browser-test-athon with the team and any volunteers at the
> >> {Lyon,Wikimania} hackathon
> >>
> >> make it trivial to run 'em, if it isn't already
> >
> > From what little experience I have of trying to establish team practices,
> > I'd say that it's best to advocate for <practice> and demonstrate its
> > value*, rather than criticise. I'd love to see you funnel your passion
> for
> > browser testing into a talk or series of talks for the mobile team – the
> > org, maybe? – or maybe you've got some recommended reading or talks you'd
> > like to share that'll inspire.
> >
> > –Sam
> >
> > * If you'd like to hear my opinions about browser testing, then insert
> one
> > beer and wind me up a little
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 8:47 PM, Dan Duvall <dduvall at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94472
> >>
> >> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Dan Duvall <dduvall at wikimedia.org>
> >> wrote:
> >> > On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:30 AM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson at gmail.com>
> >> > wrote:
> >> >> It really saddens me how very few engineers seem to care about
> browser
> >> >> tests. Our browser tests are failing all over the place. I just saw
> >> >> this bug
> >> >> [1] which has been sitting around for ages and denying us green tests
> >> >> in
> >> >> Echo one of our most important features.
> >> >>
> >> >> How can we change this anti-pattern?
> >> >
> >> > That's exactly what I'd like to explore with you and other like minds.
> >> >
> >> >> Dan Duval, would it make sense to do a survey as you did with Vagrant
> >> >> to
> >> >> understand how our developers think of these? Such as who owns
> them...
> >> >> who
> >> >> is responsible for a test failing... who writes them... who doesn't
> >> >> understand them.. why they don't understand them etc...?
> >> >
> >> > Great idea! I suspect that the number of false positives in a given
> >> > repo's test suite is inversely related to the number of developers on
> >> > the team actually writing tests, and the affordance by managers to do
> >> > so. If you're not regularly writing tests, you're probably not going
> >> > to feel comfortable troubleshooting and refactoring someone else's. If
> >> > TDD isn't factored in to your team's velocity, you may feel like the
> >> > investment in writing tests (or learning to write them) isn't worth it
> >> > or comes at the risk of missing deadlines.
> >> >
> >> > A survey could definitely help us to verify (or disprove) these
> >> > relationships.
> >> >
> >> > Some other questions I can think of:
> >> >
> >> >  - How valuable are unit tests to the health/quality of a software
> >> > project?
> >> >  - How valuable are browser tests to the health/quality of a software
> >> > project?
> >> >  - How much experience do you have with TDD?
> >> >  - Would you like more time to learn or practice TDD?
> >> >  - How often do you write tests when developing a new feature?
> >> >    - What kinds of test? (% of unit test vs. browser test)
> >> >  - How often do you write tests to verify a bugfix?
> >> >    - What kinds of test? (% of unit test vs. browser test)
> >> >  - When would you typically write a unit test? (before implementation,
> >> > after implementation, when stuff breaks)
> >> >  - When would you typically write a browser test? (during conception,
> >> > before implementation, after implementation, when stuff breaks)
> >> >  - What are the largest barriers to writing/running unit tests? (test
> >> > framework, documentation/examples, execution time, CI, structure of my
> >> > code, structure of code I depend on)
> >> >  - What are the largest barriers to writing/running browser tests?
> >> > (test framework, documentation/examples, execution time, CI)
> >> >  - What are the largest barriers to debugging test failure? (test
> >> > framework, confusing errors/stack traces, documentation/examples,
> >> > debugging tools)
> >> >
> >> > I'll create a Phab task to track it. :)
> >> >
> >> > --
> >> > Dan Duvall
> >> > Automation Engineer
> >> > Wikimedia Foundation
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Dan Duvall
> >> Automation Engineer
> >> Wikimedia Foundation
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Mobile-l mailing list
> >> Mobile-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Jon Robson
> * http://jonrobson.me.uk
> * https://www.facebook.com/jonrobson
> * @rakugojon
>
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