[jboss-as7-dev] Revisited: Integration TestSuite Organization and Maintenance

[Stuart Douglas]

On 15/08/2011, at 5:27 PM, Andrew Lee Rubinger wrote:

> A summary of where I believe we stand on the 3 points raised here:
> 
> 1) TestSuite Organization
> 
> Stuart and Kabir have voiced concerns that separating src/main and src/test make authoring more complex.
> 
> While I'll concede that may be true to a small extent, I believe the benefits of separation far outweigh the drawbacks.  By separating these out I uncovered 4 JIRAs which proved that our "api" and "spec-api" modules were incomplete.  In short, paying attention to user dependencies to validate against them is very important.
> 

Personally I still don' t think that the additional testing of the API module makes it worth the extra inconvenience. The API does not change often, and bugs are both easy to identify and work around (e.g. if we are missing an artefact it a end user can for around it by adding the dependency to their pom, not ideal, but but not the end of the world either). On the other hand if this change does result in less tests being written, then this may result in more bugs in the application server code itself, which will be much more difficult to work around.  

With that said though if everyone else agrees with this I am prepared to give it a go, with the caveat that if it causes problems we go back to the current way of doing things.

> 2) Run Modes, Test Subsets
> 
> I don't think there's been much discussion here, with the exception of the QE team who have provided some use cases that may not be possible given a standard layout.  For instance the CLI and clustering tests are more than the standard "deploy something and make assertions" format we cover in point 1), so these will likely get their own modules as is appropriate.
> 
> 3) An authoritative maintainer
> 

Most commits to the test suite come in as part of larger change sets. If there was a maintainer that was supposed to sign off on all test suite changes, then the majority of non-trivial changes would have to be approved by the maintainer, which I do not think will scale very well.

Stuart


> No one has commented on this.
> 
> By Tuesday evening I need to report back on at least the 3 points above, and also have approval for getting my patch committed.  Failing that, we need to agree on an alternate path forward.  I'm happy with any solution which addresses the respect for dependencies in the testsuite as I've outlined.
> 
> S,
> ALR
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Andrew Lee Rubinger" <andrew.rubinger at redhat.com>
> To: "JBoss AS7 Development" <jboss-as7-dev at lists.jboss.org>
> Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2011 7:38:51 AM
> Subject: [jboss-as7-dev] Revisited: Integration TestSuite Organization and	Maintenance
> 
> Hi guys:
> 
> I'd like to reopen the discussion regarding the testsuite organization 
> and its ongoing maintenance.  This issue dates back a few months with 
> some debates and differing opinions, so I'll do my best to outline the 
> guiding principles I'd like to see put in place concisely.
> 
> To start off, I've a Proof-of-Concept for many of the following points 
> now located:
> 
> https://github.com/ALRubinger/jboss-as/tree/AS7-999
> 
> The relevant JIRA I've been using to track things:
> 
> https://issues.jboss.org/browse/AS7-999
> 
> So:
> 
> 1) TestSuite Organization
> 
> I believe we need a single top-level categorization by which we may 
> organize integration tests which are deployment-based and run within the 
> context of the server.  Because we use Maven modules (which are bound to 
> a dependency structure), it makes sense to file these modules by the 
> compile-time dependencies they require.  So in place I've put:
> 
> testsuite/spec - Java SE and Java EE APIs only
> testsuite/api - AS7 APIs + Spec
> testsuite/internals - Use anything in the AS7 runtime in your 
> deployments; not guaranteed to be back-compat across releases
> 
> The primary motivation here is to ensure that the dependencies we export 
> (ie. "spec-api", and "api" modules) are complete enough for users to 
> create their own deployments.  In this setup, we act as *users* of our 
> own APIs, and everything in src/main is limited to the relevant 
> dependencies.
> 
> I know the source of some disagreements earlier centered around placing 
> the tests right next to the deployments, and some folks consider the 
> deployments as part of the test itself.  That's not a bad argument at 
> all, but again consider that we then lose the ability to validate our 
> tests in the context of our exported APIs.
> 
> 2) Run Modes, Test Subsets
> 
> Because the primary organizational criteria proposed in 1) is by 
> dependency, these modules will grow large over time.  The AS build over 
> time will take longer and longer to run.  Additionally, there are 
> runtime options to consider when starting tests.  So consider the 
> following requirements:
> 
>   * Running the testsuite in IPv6
>   * Running only a subset of tests as part of the main build
> 
> These lend themselves well to using build profiles.  By default, I think 
> the "smoke tests" should simply be a set of tests we deem important or 
> indicative of the general health of AS7 with respect to each subsystem. 
>  As it stands now, "smoke" is its own module with a bunch of 
> Embedded-based tests, and I think these should move to the 
> organizational structure in 1) and instead we can apply some filtering 
> to make the "smoke" some default set of includes.
> 
> 3) An authoritative maintainer
> 
> I'd like to treat the Arquillian and TestSuite modules as true 
> subsystems of the Application Server, and as such we'll need someone to 
> assume the responsibility to review incoming commits/pull requests and 
> ensure they fit the criteria for acceptance.  Simple things like 
> consistent package names, using ARQ correctly, and not leaking 
> dependencies are very important.
> 
> So assuming we come to agreement on these points, I'd like to request 
> push access to the AS7 repo to field testsuite and ARQ-related pull 
> requests.
> 
> ...there's much more to discuss (I've more issues to raise alongside the 
> upcoming EAP requirements), but let's start with those first 3 major 
> points and my POC, and run from there.
> 
> S,
> ALR
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