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On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:35:15AM +0000, Malini Kamalambal wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I have been working on adding tests in Tempest for Marconi, for the last few months.
> While there are many amazing people to work with, the process has been more difficult than I expected.
> 
> Couple of pain-points and suggestions to make the process easier for myself & future contributors.
> 
> 1. The QA requirements for a project to graduate needs details beyond the "Project must have a *basic* devstack-gate job set up"
> 2. The scope of Tempest needs clarification  - what tests should be in Tempest vs. in the individual projects? Or should they be in both tempest and the project?
> 
> See details below.
> 
> 1. There is little documentation on graduation requirement from a QA perspective beyond 'Project must have a basic devstack-gate job set up'.
> 
> As a result, I hear different interpretations on what a basic devstack gate job is.
> This topic was discussed in one of the QA meetings a few weeks back [1].
> Based on the discussion there, having a basic job - such as one that will let us know 'if a keystone change broke marconi' was  good enough.
> My efforts in getting Marconi meet graduation requirements w.r.t Tempest was based on the above discussion.
> 
> However, my conversations with the TC during Marconi's graduation review  lead me to believe that these requirements aren't yet formalized.
> We were told that we needed to have more test coverage in tempest, & having them elsewhere (i.e. functional tests in the Marconi project itself) was not good enough.

So having only looked at the Marconi ML thread and not the actual TC meeting
minutes I might be missing the whole picture. But, from what I saw when I looked
at both a marconi commit and a tempest commit is that there is no gating marconi
devstack-gate job on marconi commits. It's only non-voting in the check pipeline.
Additionally, there isn't a non-voting job on tempest or devstack-gate. For
example, look at how savanna has it's tempest jobs setup and this is what marconi
needs to have.

> 
> I will never debate the value of having good test coverage - after all I define myself professionally as a QA ;)
> I am proud of the unit and functional test suites & the test coverage we have in Marconi [2].
> Marconi team is continuing its efforts in this direction.
> We are looking forward to adding more tests in Tempest and making sure Marconi is in par with the community standards.
> 
> But what frustrates me is that the test requirements seem to evolve, catching  new contributors by surprise.
> 
> It will really help to have these requirements documented in detail - answering at least the following questions,
> a. What tests are needed to graduate - API, Scenario, CLI?
> b. How much coverage is good enough to graduate?
> 
> That will make sure that contributors focus their time & energy in the right direction.
> I am willing to lead the effort to document the QA-level graduation requirements for a project and help solidify them.

Testing contributions will always be an iterative process. The actual test
coverage doesn't matter as much up front. The graduation requirement as I
understood it was just to have the glue in place and to verify that everything
runs. As long as there is steady contribution and interaction from the marconi
community with tempest IMO that matters far more then actually having complete
coverage upfront.

> 
> 2. Clarify the scope of Tempest  - what tests should be in Tempest vs in the individual projects ?
> 
> It sounds like the scope of tempest is to make sure that,
> a. Projects are functionally tested (AND)
> b. Openstack components (a.k.a projects) do not have integration issues.
> 
> Assuming my understanding is correct, does it make sense to have the project specific functional tests in Tempest?
> Troubleshooting failures related to project specific functionality requires deep understanding of the individual projects.
> Isn't it better to leave it to the individual projects to make sure that they are functional?
> That will help the contributors to Tempest spend their time on what only Tempest can do -i.e. identify integration issues.

What do you mean by project specific functional testing? What makes debugging
a marconi failure in a tempest gate job any more involved than debugging a
nova or neutron failure? Part of the point of having an integrated gate is
saying that the project works well with all the others in OpenStack. IMO that's
not just in project functionality but also in community. When there is an issue
with a gate job everyone comes together to work on it. For example if you have
a keystone patch that breaks a marconi test in check there is open communication
about what happened and how to fix it.

That being said there are certain cases where having a project specific
functional test makes sense. For example swift has a functional test job that
starts swift in devstack. But, those things are normally handled on a per case
basis. In general if the project is meant to be part of the larger OpenStack
ecosystem then Tempest is the place to put functional testing. That way you know
it works with all of the other components. The thing is in openstack what seems
like a project isolated functional test almost always involves another project
in real use cases. (for example keystone auth with api requests)

Now for the boundary between what kind of test belongs where isn't always clear
and every project has a different rule of thumb on that. There really isn't a
hard and fast rule for tempest on what's allowed as long as it fits within the
criteria for the different test categories. It's handled on a per case basis.
Honestly, though I normally recommend putting as much in tempest as you can
because a big advantage of having an external test suite is that it keeps you
honest because the tests are in a separate repo.

-Matt Treinish