How to recombine builds in TeamCity? - teamcity

We have a lot of tests. I can break these up so that they run on seperate agents after an initial compile build happens, but is there a way I can recombine these results? Having 8 build configurations that all need to be green makes it hard to see if you've got one ubergreen build.
Is there a way in TeamCity to recombine / join builds once we've split them out? TW-9990 might help - allowing ANDs in the dependencies.

We found the answer which certainly works from TeamCity 5:
One compile build,
N test only builds that take compile.zip!** and copy to where the compile output would normally be. (via a template)
Consolidated finish:
Finish Build Trigger: Wait for a successful build in: ...
Snapshot Dependencies: Do not run new build if there is a suitable one
Only use successful builds from suitable ones
This all seems to work nicely and the whole shbang is easily copied for branches etc. Am very happy - this has worked well for us for many months now.

No idea how to do that natively. Here's my first thoughts on how I would try and tackle such a thing though:
Saving test results to files
Publishing the test result files as build artifacts
Creating a 'Merge build'
Adding artifact dependency onto the individual test projects
Writing a custom 'build' script using something like (N)Ant. This would parse the individual test results and publish the results as per the TC KB
Good luck!

Thinking outside the box you could have an overall build which doesn't really do anything (or use one of your test build configs as your 'master'), with snapshot dependencies on each of your split test builds. That way if any of them fail, the 'master' will fail because one the dependent build failed.
TW-9990 looks to be concerned with build triggering rather than dependencies.

Related

Maven and Jenkinsfile - skipping previous phases

I'm exploring Jenkins staging functionality and I want to devise a fast and lean setup.
Basically, Jenkins promotes the use of stages to partition in the build process and provide nice visual feedback about the progress of the build.
So the Jenkinsfile goes something like
stage("Build")
bat("mvn compile")
stage("Test")
bat("mvn test")
stage("Deploy")
bat("mvn deploy")
This works well, but feels wrong, because deploy and test will both do activities from previous phases again.
As a result, in this setup I am building three times (although skipping compilation due to no changes) and testing two times (in the test and the deploy runs).
When I google around I can find various switches and one of them works for skipping unit tests, but the compilation and dependency resolution steps happen regardless of what I do.
Do I need to choose between speed and stages in this case or can I have both?
I mean:
stage("Resolve dependencies, build, test and deploy")
bat("mvn deploy")
is by far the fastest approach, but it doesn't produce a nice progress table in Jenkins.
In order to bring incremental builds in Maven phases as Gradle does, you can use takari-lifecycle maven plugin.
So, once the plugin is apply you will get all the benefits. In your example, Test stage which will perform mvn test will avoid compilation because it was compiled in the previous stage and Deploy stage will avoid compilation from your main source code and test source code but tests will be executed again so I suggest to add -DskipTests.

Incremental run of testsuite

We have a large project that has several thousands of tests in the testsuite, and the full testsuite run takes very long time.
I am looking for a tool that I can integrate in the Maven build that will run only those tests that might be affected (knowing code coverage for each), because some covered code has changes.
I was googling that and found a few similar things but not a perfect fit:
Ekstazi http://www.ekstazi.org/ looks like exactly that, but it does not work out-of-the box with TestNG (used in the testsuite), and it is not open source
Infinitest https://infinitest.github.io/ seems to focus mainly on IDE integration - is it possible to run the tests only on demand (just like mvn infinitest)?
PIT http://pitest.org/ is not exactly what I am looking for but it also needs to analyze per-test coverage
It would be also very useful to remember test coverage with (last) git commit and run the tests against the last code changes.
Further suggestions and comments on those above are welcome.
As far as I can see, Infinitest doesn't provide corresponding Maven plugin, so it's impossible to do using it. You may consider creating it though, making an invaluable contribution to the world.
As far as I can see, it provides pretty solid API so writing a plugin shouldn't be a big problem. You may want to take a look at InfinitestCore interface first. If you're using a CI environment you may want to provide file list for the Infinitest directly from git diff --name-only HEAD~1 which will produce the list of files changed in latest commit (as an example, if you run your builds against each commit).
UPD. It seems like there's a workaround involving maven-exec-plugin to explicitly run Infinitest in the Maven build: you can run 'mvn exec:exec' from the command line or from m2eclipse's Maven
Build launcher to run Infinitest against your project. I'd advice specifying the explicit build phase on which it should be run using the executions element in POM:
executions: It is important to keep in mind that a plugin may have multiple goals. Each goal may have a separate configuration, possibly even binding a plugin's goal to a different phase altogether. executions configure the execution of a plugin's goals.

How to split a big Jenkins job/project into smaller jobs without compromising functuality?

we're trying to improve our Jenkins setup. So far we have two directories: /plugins and /tests.
Our project is a multi-module project of Eclipse Plugins. The test plugins in the /tests folder are fragment projects dependent on their corresponding productive code plugins in /plugins.
Until now, we had just one Jenkins job which checked out both /plugins and /tests, built all of them and produced the Surefire results etc.
We're now thinking about splitting the project into smaller jobs corresponding to features we provide. It seems that the way we tried to do it is suboptimal.
We tried the following:
We created a job for the core feature. This job checks out the whole /plugins and /tests directories and only builds the plugins the feature is comprised of. This job has a separate pom.xml which defines the core artifact and tells about the modules contained in the feature.
We created a separate job for the tests that should be run on the feature plugins. This job uses the cloned workspace from the core job. This job is to be run after the core feature is built.
I somehow think this is less than optimal.
For instance, only the core job can update the checked out files. If only the tests are updated, the core feature does not need to be built again, but it will be.
As soon as I have a feature which is dependent on the core feature, this feature would either need to use a clone of the core feature workspace or check out its own copy of /plugins and /tests, which would lead to bloat.
Using a cloned workspace, I can't update my sources. So when I have a feature depending on another feature, I can only do the job if the core feature is updated and built.
I think I'm missing some basic stuff here. Can someone help? There definitely is an easier way for this.
EDIT: I'll try to formulate what I think would ideally happen if everything works:
check if the feature components have changed (i.e. an update on them is possible)
if changed, build the feature
Build the dependent features, if necessary (i.e. check ob corresponding job)
Build the feature itself
if build successful, start feature test job
let me see the results of the test job in the feature job
Finally, the project job should
do a nightly build
check out all sources from /plugins and /tests
build all, test all, send results to Sonar
Additionally, it would be neat if the nightly build was unnecessary because the builds and test results of the projects' features would be combined in the project job results.
Is something like this possible?
Starting from the end of the question. I would keep a separate nightly job that does a clean check-out (gets rid of any generated stuff before check-out), builds everything from scratch, and runs all tests. If you aren't doing a clean build, you can't guarantee that what is checked into your repository really builds.
check if the feature components have changed (i.e. an update on them is possible)
if changed, build the feature
Build the dependent features, if necessary (i.e. check ob corresponding job)
Build the feature itself
if build successful, start feature test job
let me see the results of the test job in the feature job
[I am assuming that by "dependent features" in 1 you mean the things needed by the "feature" in 2.]
To do this, I would say that you have multiple jobs.
a job for every individual feature and every dependent feature that simply builds that feature. The jobs should be started by SCM changes for the (dependent) feature.
I wouldn't keep separate test jobs from compile jobs. It allows the possibility that successfully compiled code is never tested. Instead, I would rely on the fact that wen a build step fails in Jenkins, it normally aborts further build steps.
The trick is going to be in how you thread all of these together.
Let's say we have a feature and it's build job called F1 that is built on 2 dependent features DF1.1 and DF1.2, each with their own build jobs.
Both DF1.1 and DF1.2 should be configured to trigger the build of F1.
F1 should be configured to get the artifacts it needs from the latest successful DF1.1 and DF1.2 builds. Unfortunately, the very nice "Clone SCM" plugin is not going to be of much help here as it only pulls from one previous job. Perhaps one of the artifact publisher plugins might be useful, or you may need to add some custom build steps to put/get artifacts.

how to time (profile) maven goals in a multi-module project

We have a huge project with many submodules. A full build takes currently over 30mins.
I wonder how this time distributes over different plugins/goals, e.g. tests, static analysis (findbugs, pmd, checkstyle, etc ...)
Would it be possible to time the build to see where (in both dimensions: modules and goals) most time is spent?
The maven-buildtime-extension is a maven plugin that can be used to see the times of each goal:
https://github.com/timgifford/maven-buildtime-extension
If you run the build in a CI server like TeamCity or Jenkins (formerly Hudson), it will give you timestamps for every step in the build process and you should be able to use these values to determine which goals/projects are taking the most time.
I don't think there is any way built in to maven to do this. In fact, in the related question artbristol posted, there is a link to a Maven feature request for this functionality. Unfortunately, this issue is unresolved and I don't know if it will ever be added.
The other potential solution is to write your own plugin which would provide this build metadata for you.
I don't think there is a way to determine the timing of particular goals. What you can do is run the particular goals separately to see how long they take. So instead of doing a "mvn install" which runs all of your tests, checkstyle, etc.. just do "mvn checkstyle:checkstyle" to see how long that takes for a particular module.
Having everything done every time is nice when its done by an automated server (continuum/jenkins/hudson) but when you are building locally, sometimes its better to be able to just compile. Some of the things you can do are have the static analysis goals ONLY run when you pass in a certain parameter or profile. Another option is to only have them ran when maven.test.skip=false.
If you are using a continuous build, try having the static analysis only done every 4 hours, or daily.

TeamCity - non-trivial build sequence, please advice

I am tasked to improve quality and implement TeamCity for continuous integration. My experience with TeamCity is very limited - I use mostly TFS myself and have some experience with CC.NET.
A lot should happen within a build process... actually the build is already pushed into three different configurations that will run one after the next.
My main problem is that in each of those I actually would need to start multiple runners. For example, the first build step shall consist of:
The generation of new AssemblyInfo.cs files for consistent in assembly numbering
The actual compilation
A partial unit test run (all tests that run fast and check core functionality)
An FxCop run
A StyleCop run
The current version of TeamCity only allows to configure one runner ... which leaves me stuck with a lot of things.
How you would approach this? My current idea is going towards using the MsBuild runner for everything and basically start my own MsBuild based script which then does all the things, pretty much the way that TFS handles it (and the same way i did things back in the cc.net way with my own Nant build script).
On a further problem the question is how to present statistical information, for example from unit tests running in different stages (build configurations). We have some further down that take some time to run and want that to run in a 2nd or 3rd step (the latest for example testing database generation code which, including loading base data, takes about 15+ minutes to run). OTOH we would really like test results to be somehow consolidated.
Anyone any ideas?
Thanks.
TeamCity 6.0 allows multiple build steps for a single build configuration. Isn't it what you're looking for?
You'll need to script this out, at least parts of it. TeamCity provides some nice UI based config for some of your needs, but not all. Here's my suggestion:
Create an msbuild script to handle your first two bullet points, AssemblyInfo generation and compilation. Configure the msbuild runner to run your script, and to run your tests. Collect your assemblies as artifacts.
Create a second build configuration for FxCop. Trigger it from the first build. Give it an 'artifact dependency' on the first build, which is how it gets a hold of your dlls.
For StyleCop, TC doesn't support it out of the box like it does FxCop. Add it to your msbuild script manually, and have it produce an html report (which TeamCity can then display).
You need to take a look at the Dependencies functionality in the TeamCity. This feature allows you to create a sequence of build configurations. In other words, you need to create a build configuration for each step and then link all them as dependencies.
For consolidating test results please take a loot at the Artifact Dependencies. It might help.

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