Re: Deciding on a default company setup for BDD tests

[John Locke <..hidden..>]

Hi,

On 01/21/2016 05:54 PM, David G wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I agree with Michaels comments, with a couple of extra thoughts inline
> below.
>
> On 19/01/16 09:13, Michael Richardson wrote:
>> Erik Huelsmann <..hidden..> wrote:
>>
>>
>>      > To start with the first and foremost question: do we want our tests to run
>>      > succesfully on a copy of *any* company (as John stated he would like, on IRC)
>>      > or do we "design" the company setups we want to run our tests on, from
>>      > scratch, as I was aiming for? (Note that I wasn't aiming for regenerating all
>>      > setup data on each scenario or feature; I'm just talking about making sure we
>>      > *know* what's in the database -- we'd still run on a copy of a database set
>>      > up according to this plan).
>>
>> By *any* company, you mean, I could run it against (a copy of) my database?
>> I think that is not useful to focus on right now.
> I agree that it's probably not a good thing to focus on right now,
> but,
> I think it would be worth keeping in mind so the tests aren't written to
> exclude this as a possibility.
> In the long run, I think rather than the tests being designed to be run
> on a *live* database they should,
> if run on a "non test" database copy the DB to a new DB ${name}-bdd-test
> and run against the copy.
>
> I think this is a better long term solution as for many scenarios it may
> be impossible to properly remove entries from the database due to the
> Audit Features we have.

Drupal has a tremendous amount of variation between sites, and lots of 
configuration that ends up in the database. This certainly colors my 
perspective -- and that's why I think it's important to be able to run 
BDD tests on a copy of any production database.

I'm not sure that's the same for LedgerSMB -- but it would certainly 
help track down issues if people customize their database in ways we 
don't expect.

What we're really talking about here is how to set up test data -- 
whether we ship a test database already containing data our tests rely 
upon, or have those dependencies created when running the tests.

I pretty strongly advocate the latter -- create the configurations/data 
we are testing for at the start of a test run, if they don't already 
exist. And make it safe to re-run a test on the same database.

I don't mind cleaning up test data if a test fails in development, but 
as long as tests are completing, they should be able to be run multiple 
times on the same db.

>>      > Additionally, John and I were talking about supporting test infrastructure
>>      > and we agree that it would be tremendously helpful to be able to see
>>      > screenshots of failing scenarios and maybe to be able to see screenshots of
>>      > various points in non-failing tests too. Since Travis storage isn't
>>      > persistent, we were thinking that we'd need to collect all screenshots as
>>      > "build artifacts" and upload them into an AWS S3 account for inspection.
>>
>> Email to ticket system?
>> Or S3...
> Michael makes a really good point here.
> Perhaps the easiest way of capturing the screenshots is not to use S3,
> but have a github project (eg: ledgersmb-bdd-results) that we can raise
> a ticket against for failing builds with associated screenshots attached.
> At the same time we could use "git annex" to store all screenshots for a
> test in a new git branch (or just simply a tag) in the
> ledgersmb-bdd-results project repository.
>
> Storing "good" results probably should only be done if a specific flag
> is passed in the PR commit message.
> While all screenshots (good and bad) should be stored if a single test
> fails.

However we store them, I suggest we at least store "good" results for 
each release. Especially of screenshots. This will allow comparing 
version-on-version, as well as give you a place to go back to see "what 
did this look like in version x?"

S3 storage seems to be built in to many test runners like Travis, I'm 
guessing that's the fastest/easiest to get up and running.

The Matrix project uses Jenkins as a test runner, and the runs are 
public, so you can access artifacts just by visiting their jenkins 
instance, no logins necessary. Can Travis do the same?

Cheers,
John Locke
http://www.freelock.com

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