[openstack-dev] [third-party-ci][neutron] What is "Success" exactly?

Kevin Benton blak111 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 3 17:27:37 UTC 2014


>This allows the viewer to see categories of reviews based upon their
>divergence from OpenStack's Jenkins results. I think evaluating
>divergence from Jenkins might be a metric worth consideration.

I think the only thing this really reflects though is how much the third
party CI system is mirroring Jenkins.
A system that frequently diverges may be functioning perfectly fine and
just has a vastly different code path that it is integration testing so it
is legitimately detecting failures the OpenStack CI cannot.

--
Kevin Benton


On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 6:49 AM, Anita Kuno <anteaya at anteaya.info> wrote:

> On 07/03/2014 07:12 AM, Salvatore Orlando wrote:
> > Apologies for quoting again the top post of the thread.
> >
> > Comments inline (mostly thinking aloud)
> > Salvatore
> >
> >
> > On 30 June 2014 22:22, Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi Stackers,
> >>
> >> Some recent ML threads [1] and a hot IRC meeting today [2] brought up
> some
> >> legitimate questions around how a newly-proposed Stackalytics report
> page
> >> for Neutron External CI systems [2] represented the results of an
> external
> >> CI system as "successful" or not.
> >>
> >> First, I want to say that Ilya and all those involved in the
> Stackalytics
> >> program simply want to provide the most accurate information to
> developers
> >> in a format that is easily consumed. While there need to be some
> changes in
> >> how data is shown (and the wording of things like "Tests Succeeded"), I
> >> hope that the community knows there isn't any ill intent on the part of
> >> Mirantis or anyone who works on Stackalytics. OK, so let's keep the
> >> conversation civil -- we're all working towards the same goals of
> >> transparency and accuracy. :)
> >>
> >> Alright, now, Anita and Kurt Taylor were asking a very poignant
> question:
> >>
> >> "But what does CI tested really mean? just running tests? or tested to
> >> pass some level of requirements?"
> >>
> >> In this nascent world of external CI systems, we have a set of issues
> that
> >> we need to resolve:
> >>
> >> 1) All of the CI systems are different.
> >>
> >> Some run Bash scripts. Some run Jenkins slaves and devstack-gate
> scripts.
> >> Others run custom Python code that spawns VMs and publishes logs to some
> >> public domain.
> >>
> >> As a community, we need to decide whether it is worth putting in the
> >> effort to create a single, unified, installable and runnable CI system,
> so
> >> that we can legitimately say "all of the external systems are identical,
> >> with the exception of the driver code for vendor X being substituted in
> the
> >> Neutron codebase."
> >>
> >
> > I think such system already exists, and it's documented here:
> > http://ci.openstack.org/
> > Still, understanding it is quite a learning curve, and running it is not
> > exactly straightforward. But I guess that's pretty much understandable
> > given the complexity of the system, isn't it?
> >
> >
> >>
> >> If the goal of the external CI systems is to produce reliable,
> consistent
> >> results, I feel the answer to the above is "yes", but I'm interested to
> >> hear what others think. Frankly, in the world of benchmarks, it would be
> >> unthinkable to say "go ahead and everyone run your own benchmark suite",
> >> because you would get wildly different results. A similar problem has
> >> emerged here.
> >>
> >
> > I don't think the particular infrastructure which might range from an
> > openstack-ci clone to a 100-line bash script would have an impact on the
> > "reliability" of the quality assessment regarding a particular driver or
> > plugin. This is determined, in my opinion, by the quantity and nature of
> > tests one runs on a specific driver. In Neutron for instance, there is a
> > wide range of choices - from a few test cases in tempest.api.network to
> the
> > full smoketest job. As long there is no minimal standard here, then it
> > would be difficult to assess the quality of the evaluation from a CI
> > system, unless we explicitly keep into account coverage into the
> evaluation.
> >
> > On the other hand, different CI infrastructures will have different
> levels
> > in terms of % of patches tested and % of infrastructure failures. I think
> > it might not be a terrible idea to use these parameters to evaluate how
> > good a CI is from an infra standpoint. However, there are still open
> > questions. For instance, a CI might have a low patch % score because it
> > only needs to test patches affecting a given driver.
> >
> >
> >> 2) There is no mediation or verification that the external CI system is
> >> actually testing anything at all
> >>
> >> As a community, we need to decide whether the current system of
> >> self-policing should continue. If it should, then language on reports
> like
> >> [3] should be very clear that any numbers derived from such systems
> should
> >> be taken with a grain of salt. Use of the word "Success" should be
> avoided,
> >> as it has connotations (in English, at least) that the result has been
> >> verified, which is simply not the case as long as no verification or
> >> mediation occurs for any external CI system.
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >> 3) There is no clear indication of what tests are being run, and
> therefore
> >> there is no clear indication of what "success" is
> >>
> >> I think we can all agree that a test has three possible outcomes: pass,
> >> fail, and skip. The results of a test suite run therefore is nothing
> more
> >> than the aggregation of which tests passed, which failed, and which were
> >> skipped.
> >>
> >> As a community, we must document, for each project, what are expected
> set
> >> of tests that must be run for each merged patch into the project's
> source
> >> tree. This documentation should be discoverable so that reports like [3]
> >> can be crystal-clear on what the data shown actually means. The report
> is
> >> simply displaying the data it receives from Gerrit. The community needs
> to
> >> be proactive in saying "this is what is expected to be tested." This
> alone
> >> would allow the report to give information such as "External CI system
> ABC
> >> performed the expected tests. X tests passed. Y tests failed. Z tests
> were
> >> skipped." Likewise, it would also make it possible for the report to
> give
> >> information such as "External CI system DEF did not perform the expected
> >> tests.", which is excellent information in and of itself.
> >>
> >>
> > Agreed. In Neutron we have enforced CIs but not yet agreed on what's the
> > minimum set of tests we expect them to run. I reckon this will be fixed
> > soon.
> >
> > I'll try to look at what "SUCCESS" is from a naive standpoint: a CI says
> > "SUCCESS" if the test suite it rans passed; then one should have means to
> > understand whether a CI might blatantly lie or tell "half truths". For
> > instance saying it passes tempest.api.network while
> > tempest.scenario.test_network_basic_ops has not been executed is a half
> > truth, in my opinion.
> > Stackalitycs can help here, I think. One could create "CI classes"
> > according to how much they're close to the level of the upstream gate,
> and
> > then parse results posted to classify CIs. Now, before cursing me, I
> > totally understand that this won't be easy at all to implement!
> > Furthermore, I don't know whether how this should be reflected in gerrit.
> >
> >
> >> ===
> >>
> >> In thinking about the likely answers to the above questions, I believe
> it
> >> would be prudent to change the Stackalytics report in question [3] in
> the
> >> following ways:
> >>
> >> a. Change the "Success %" column header to "% Reported +1 Votes"
> >> b. Change the phrase " Green cell - tests ran successfully, red cell -
> >> tests failed" to "Green cell - System voted +1, red cell - System voted
> -1"
> >>
> >
> > That makes sense to me.
> >
> >
> >>
> >> and then, when we have more and better data (for example, # tests
> passed,
> >> failed, skipped, etc), we can provide more detailed information than
> just
> >> "reported +1" or not.
> >>
> >
> > I think it should not be too hard to start adding minimal measures such
> as
> > "% of voted patches"
> >
> >>
> >> Thoughts?
> >>
> >> Best,
> >> -jay
> >>
> >> [1] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-
> >> June/038933.html
> >> [2] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/third_party/2014/
> >> third_party.2014-06-30-18.01.log.html
> >> [3] http://stackalytics.com/report/ci/neutron/7
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> OpenStack-dev mailing list
> >> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> >> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > OpenStack-dev mailing list
> > OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> > http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
> >
> Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Salvadore.
>
> Some additional things to look at:
>
> Sean Dague has created a tool in stackforge gerrit-dash-creator:
>
> http://git.openstack.org/cgit/stackforge/gerrit-dash-creator/tree/README.rst
> which has the ability to make interesting queries on gerrit results. One
> such example can be found here: http://paste.openstack.org/show/85416/
> (Note when this url was created there was a bug in the syntax and this
> url works in chrome but not firefox, Sean tells me the firefox bug has
> been addressed - though this url hasn't been altered with the new syntax
> yet)
>
> This allows the viewer to see categories of reviews based upon their
> divergence from OpenStack's Jenkins results. I think evaluating
> divergence from Jenkins might be a metric worth consideration.
>
> Also a gui representation worth looking at is Mikal Still's gui for
> Neutron ci health:
> http://www.rcbops.com/gerrit/reports/neutron-cireport.html
> and Nova ci health:
> http://www.rcbops.com/gerrit/reports/nova-cireport.html
>
> I don't know the details of how the graphs are calculated in these
> pages, but being able to view passed/failed/missed and compare them to
> Jenkins is an interesting approach and I feel has some merit.
>
> Thanks I think we are getting some good information out in this thread
> and look forward to hearing more thoughts.
>
> Thank you,
> Anita.
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenStack-dev mailing list
> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>



-- 
Kevin Benton
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