While the refactoring step of test driven development should always involve another full run of tests for the given functionality, what is your approach about preventing possible regressions beyond the functionality itself?
My professional experience makes me want to retest the whole functional module after any code change. Is it what TDD recommends?
Thank you.
While the refactoring step of test driven development should always
involve another full run of tests for the given functionality, what is
your approach about preventing possible regressions beyond the
functionality itself?
When you are working on specific feature it is enough to run tests for the given functionality only. There is no need to do full regression.
My professional experience makes me want to retest the whole
functional module after any code change.
You do not need to do full regression but you can, since Unit tests are small, simple and fast.
Also, there are several tools that are used for "Continuous Testing" in different languages:
in Ruby (e.g Watchr)
in PHP, (e.g. Sismo)
in .NET (e.g. NCrunch)
All these tools are used to run tests automatically on your local machine to get fast feedback.
Only when you are about to finish implementation of the feature it is time to do full run of all your tests.
Running tests on Continuous integration (CI) server is essential. Especially, when you have lots of integration tests.
TDD is just a methodology to write new code or modify old one. Your entire tests base should be ran every time a modification is done to any of the code file (new feature or refactoring). That's how you ensure no regression has taken place. We're talking about automatic testing here (unit-tests, system-tests, acceptance-tests, sometimes performance tests as well)
Continuous integration (CI) will help you achieve that: a CI server (Jenkins, Hudson, TeamCity, CruiseControl...) will have all your tests, and run them automatically when you commit a change to source control. It can also calculate test coverage and indicate where your code is insufficiently tested (note if you do proper TDD, your test coverage should always be 100%).
Related
I'm trying to understand CI/CD strategy.
Many CI/CD articles mention that it's a automation services of build, test, deploy phase.
I would to know does CI/CD concept have any prerequisites step(s)?
For example, if I make a simple tool that automatically builds and deploys, but test step is manual - can this be considered CI/CD?
There's a minor point of minutia that should be mentioned first: the "D" in "CI/CD" can either mean "Delivery" or "Deployment". For the sake of this question, we'll accept the two terms as relatively interchangeable -- but be aware that others may apply a more narrow definition, which may be slightly different depending on which "D" you mean, specifically. For additional context, see: Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment
For example, if I make a simple tool that automatically builds and deploys, but test step is manual - can this be considered CI/CD?
Let's break this down. Beforehand, let's establish what can be considered "CI/CD". Easy enough: if your (automated) process is practicing both CI (continuous integration) and CD (continuous deployment), then we can consider the solution as being some form of "CI/CD".
We'll need some definitions for CI and CD (see above link), which may vary by opinion. But if the question is whether this can be considered CI/CD, we can proceed on the lowest common denominator / bare minimum of popular/accepted definitions and apply those definitions liberally as they relate to the principles of CI/CD.
With that context, let's proceed to determine whether the constituent components are present.
Is Continuous Integration being practiced?
Yes. Continuous Integration is being practiced in this scenario. Continuous integration, in its most basic sense, is making sure that your ongoing work is regularly (continually) integrated (tested).
The whole idea is to combat the consequences of integrating (testing) too infrequently. If you do many many changes and never try to build/test the software, any of those changes may have very well broken the build, but you won't know until the point in time where integration (testing) occurs.
You are regularly integrating your changes and making sure the software still builds. This is unequivocally CI in practice.
But there are no automated tests?!
One may make an objection to the effect of "if you're not running what is traditionally thought of as tests (unit|integration|smoke|etc) as part of your automated process, it's not CI" -- this is a demonstrably false statement.
Even though in this case you mention that your "test" steps would be manual, it's still fair to say that simply building your application would be sufficient to meet the basic definition of a "test" in the sense of continuous integration. Successfully building (e.g. compiling) your code is, in itself IS a test. You are effectively testing "can it build". If your code change breaks the compile/build process, your CI process will tell you so right after committing your code -- that's CI in action.
Just like code changes may break a unit test, they can also break the compilation process -- automating your build tests that your changes did not break the build and is, therefore, a kind of continuous integration, without question.
Sure, your product can be broken by your changes even if it compiles successfully. It may even be the case that those software defects would have been caught by sufficient unit testing. But the same could be said of projects with proper unit tests, even projects with "100% code coverage". We certainly don't consider projects with test gaps as not practicing CI. The size of the test gap doesn't make the distinction between CI and non-CI; it's irrelevant to the definition.
Bottom line: building your software exercises (integrates/tests) your code changes, if even only in a minimally significant degree. Doing this on a continuous basis is a form of continuous integration.
Is Continuous Deployment/Delivery being practiced
Yes. It is plain to see in this scenario that, if you are deploying/delivering your software to whatever its 'production environment' is in an automated fashion then you have the "CD" component to CI/CD, at least in some minimal degree. The fact that your tests may be manual is not consequential.
Similar to the above, reasonable people could disagree on the effectiveness of the implementation depending on the details, but one would not be able to make the case that this practice is non-CD, by definition.
Conclusion: can this practice be considered "CI/CD"?
Yes. Both elements of CI and CD are present in at least a minimum degree. The practices used probably can't reasonably be called non-CI or non-CD. Therefore, it should be concluded this described practice can be considered "CI/CD".
I think it goes without saying that the described CI/CD process has gaps and could benefit from improvement and, with the lack of automated tests and other features, doesn't reap all the possible benefits of a robust CI/CD process could offer. However, this doesn't render the process non-CICD by any means. It's certainly CI/CD in practice; whether it's a particularly good or robust CI/CD practice is a subject of opinion.
does CI/CD concept have any prerequisites step(s)?
No, there are no specific prerequisites (like writing automated software tests, for example) to applying CI/CD concepts. You can apply both CI and CD independently of one another without any prerequisites.
To further illustrate, let's think of an even more minimal project with "CI/CD"...
CD could be as simple as committing to the main branch repository of a GitHub Pages. If that same Pages repo, for example, uses Jekyll, then you have CI, too, as GitHub will build your project automatically in addition to deploying it and inform you of build errors when they occur.
In this basic example, the only thing that was needed to implement "CI/CD" was commit the Jekyll project code to a GitHub Pages repository. No prerequisites.
There's even cases where you can accurately consider a project as having a CI process and the CI process might not even build any software at all! CI could, for example, consist solely of code style checks or other trivial checks like checking for newlines at the end of files. When projects only include these kinds of checks alone, we would still call that check process "CI" and it wouldn't be an inaccurate description of the process.
I am not sure what is the best practice for running unit tests.
I suppose every developers should pass the unit tests locally before pushing the code to the GIT repo. And then the CI server (Jenkins) would pick up the new changes and run the tests again.
Why do we want to do it twice? Should we?
If the unit tests take a lot of time to run, do we expect the developer only picks the tests related to the change or runs every tests (even outside the scope of his projects), assuming we have a big maven multi-module POM.
Also consider we usually have a powerful hardware for CI server and relatively less powerful workstation for developers.
If the unit tests take a lot of time to run, do we expect the
developer only picks the tests related to the change or runs every
tests (even outside the scope of his projects), assuming we have a big
maven multi-module POM.
As a developer changes a class, modifies the database structure or makes any change that could have side effects, he/she will not/cannot know all potential side effects on the whole application.
And he/she never has to try to be too clever by saying : "I know that it may have be broken with my changes, so I will run just this test".
Unit testing ensures a some degree of code quality : don't make it less helpful
The unit tests are also non-regression tests. To not play all non regression tests before commit and push is taking the risk to introduce flawed code in the source content management.
You will never do it.
Unit tests have to be fast executed
If units test are so long to be executed as it hurts the developer velocity , it generally means that they are bad designed or maybe that they are not real unit tests. A unit test is designed to be run fast.
If you write tests that are long to be run because they require to start a server, to load/clean data in a database, to load/unload some containers, and so for... it means you didn't write unit test but integration tests. These tests are not designed to be executed regularly and automatically on the local development machine but on a CI tool.
The CI has to run all tests
Do we need to run tests in CI server if every developers run the tests
before push?
As explained, integration tests have to be executed by the CI tool.
About unit testing, sparing their execution in the CI side is not a good idea either.
Of course developers have to run the tests before pushing to the SCM but actually you don't have the guarantee that it will always be done.
Besides, even in a perfect world where developers execute all tests before pushing, you could fall into cases where the tests are successful on the developer machine but fail on the CI or the other developer machines.
For example, the developer could introduce in the base code some absolute paths specific to its machine or he/she could also forget to replicate a modification on the database used in the CI environment.
So running all tests (unit and integration tests) has not to be an option for the CI.
Yes, they shall be run twice. Because if some developers don't, then they run never. Developers should run the tests locally to make sure that their code works correctly.
Your CI system is however your reference, so there's no chance of one person arguing that it "works on my machine", but fails for others. Looking forward to continuous delivery, knowing this state on the CI/CD system becomes even more important.
You might hope that always and forever, every commit has been tested successfully locally (and all workstations are the same and identical with production systems...), but hope is a bad strategy.
We are following agile for our s/w development & we get a new build every 2 days. So how should i maintain my jmeter scripts. Which tool will help me in maintaining the scripts so that i can see the gradual improvement or degradation of our product
Most probably you're looking for a continuous integration tool, if you have a build server which compiles your product, runs unit tests, packages it, etc. you can add your JMeter tests as an extra step to act as regression test
If you don't have specific continuous integration solution in mind I'd recommend going for Jenkins, it's free, open source and Java-based so you won't require to setup an "alien" runtime.
With regards to JMeter and Jenkins integration there is Performance Plugin which is capable of displaying performance trends you're looking for across builds and also can mark builds as unstable or failed depending on metrics thresholds.
We usually do smoke tests to check critical functionalities whenever we receive a new build. After executing the smoke tests, we are sure to go to next stage (next level of testing). I heard from my colleagues that smoke tests are really useful when your team employs Continuous Integration and DevOps. Smoke tests are always beneficial, but how it will be more beneficial with the combination of CI and DevOps?
Testing is interesting and every time a new challenge for QA which requires higher level of efforts in the final deployment of product. This consist of continuous delivery in continuous integration environment. In this continuous deployment process, requires testing to be followed in parallel in order to keep the process moving.
I've usually heard smoke testing used to refer to manual testing that you run to sanity-check builds. This article defines smoke testing as follows:
Smoke Testing, also known as “Build Verification Testing”, is a type
of software testing that comprises of a non-exhaustive set of tests
that aim at ensuring that the most important functions work. The
results of this testing is used to decide if a build is stable enough
to proceed with further testing.
First, I would certainly hope that people are doing this whenever they check code into the main branch to ensure that their changes didn't break the software in some obvious way. That holds whether you're doing continuous integration or not. (One of my personal pet peeves has always been people who check in code and then leave for the day without checking to make sure that it worked).
Also, keep in mind that in a typical CI cycle nowadays a build will often occur with every checkin to the main branch (or, at a minimum, there will be a nightly automated build; at my current company we have both), so you don't really have time to manually run your entire test suite for every build. One of the main purposes of CI is to have integration (and, as an extension, builds) occur much more frequently than is typical in other kinds of development cycles.
As one final comment: if you're doing continuous integration, I'd strongly encourage you to have some kind of automated testing (e.g. coded UI tests, unit tests, etc.) as part of that. Those can provide basic smoke/sanity testing and regression testing and reduce the burden of having to do all of it manually for every build.
I've used a Continuous Integration server in the past with great success, and hadn't had the need to ever perform a code freeze on the source control system.
However, lately it seems that everywhere I look, most shops are using the concept of code freezes when preparing for a release, or even a new test version of their product. This idea runs even in my current project.
When you check-in early and often, and use unit tests, integration tests, acceptance tests, etc., are code freezes still needed?
Continuous integration is a "build" but it's part of the programming part of the development cycle. Just like the "tests" in TDD are part of the programming part of the development cycle.
There will still be builds and testing as part of the overall development cycle.
The point of continuous integration and tests is to shorten the feedback loops and give programmers more visibility. Ultimately, this does mean less problems in testing and builds, but it doesn't mean you no longer do the original parts of your development cycle - they are just more effective and can be raised to a higher level, since more tivial problems are being caught earlier in the development cycle.
So you will still have to have a code freeze (or at least a branch) in order to ensure the baseline for what you are shipping is as expected. Just because someone can implement something with a high degree of confidence does not mean it goes into your release without passing through the same final cycles, and the code freeze is an important part of that.
With CI, your code freezes can be very short, since your final build, testing and release may be very reliable, and code freeze may not even exist on small projects, since there is no need for a branch - you release and go right back into development on the next set of features very quickly.
I'd also like to add that CI and TDD allow the final build and testing phase to revert back closer to the traditional waterfall (do all dev, do all testing, then release), as opposed to the more continual QA which has been done on projects with weekly or monthly builds. Your testers can use the CI builds to give early feedback, but it's effectively a different sort of feedback than in the final testing, where you are looking for stability and reliability as opposed to functionality (which obviously was missed in the unit "tests" which the developers had built).
Code freezes are important, because continues integration does not replace runtime regression testing.
Having an application build and pass unit testing is only a small part of the challenge, ideally, when you freeze code for a release, you are signing off on two things:
This code has been fully regressioned, and is defect free
This code is EXACTLY the code that should be in production (for SOX compliance).
If your using a modern SCM, just fork the code at that point and start work on the next release in a branch, and do a merge when the project is deployed. (Of course, place a label so you can rollback that point if you need to apply a breaking patch).
Once code is in "release mode", it should not be touched.
Our typical process:
Development
||
\/
QAT
||
\/
UAT => Freeze until deploy date => Deploy => Merge and repeat
\ /
\- New Branch for future dev -------/
Of course, we usually have many parallel branches during development, that merge back up into the release stream before UAT.
The code freeze has more to do with QA than it has to do with Dev. The code freeze is the point where QA has said: "Enough. We only have bandwidth to fully test the new features added in so far." That doesn't mean dev doesn't have the bandwidth to add more features, it's just that QA needs time with a quiescent code base to ensure that everything works together.
If you're all in continuous integration mode (QA included) this could be just a freeze of a very short time while QA puts the final seal of approval on the whole package just before it goes out the door.
It all depends on how tightly your QA and regression testing are integrated into the dev cycle.
I'd second the votes already mentioned about SCM branching and allowing dev to continue on a different code branch than what QA is testing. It all goes back to the same thing. QA and regression testing need a quiescent code base for a period of time prior to release.
I think that code freezes are important because each new feature is a potential new source of bugs. Sure regression tests are great and help address this issue. But code freezes allow the developers to focus on fixing currently outstanding bugs and get the current feature set into a release worthy state.
At best, if I really wanted to develop new code during a code freeze, I would fork the frozen tree, do my work there, then after the freeze, merge the forked tree back in.
I'm going to sound like one of the context-driven people but the answer is "it depends".
Code Freeze is a strategy to cope with a problem. If you don't have the problem it is good at addressing, then no, it isn't needed. If you have another technique for addressing the problem, then no, it isn't needed.
Code Freeze is one technique for reducing risk. The advantages if brings are stability and simplicity. The disadvantage it brings are
Another technique is to use Branching, such as with "Feature Branches". The disadvantage of Branching is cost of dealing with the branches, of merging changes.
The technique you're describing for reducing risk is Automated Testing to give fast feedback. The trade-off here is increased velocity for some increased risk (you will miss some bugs).
Of these approaches I'm with you, I prefer the Automated Testing. But there are some situations, such as very high cost of failure, where a Code Freeze does provide a lot of value.