Open Stack

Hi everyone,

Before we start the larger discussion at summit next week about the future of
testing in OpenStack - specifically about spinning up functional testing and how
it relates to tempest - I would like to share some of my thoughts on how we can
get things started and how I think they'll eventually come together.

Currently in tempest we have a large number of tests (mostly api-focused)
which are probably a better fit for a project's functional test suite. The best
example I can think of is the nova flavors tests. Validation of flavor
manipulation doesn't need to run in the integrated test suite on every commit to
every project because it only requires Nova. A simple win for initiating in-tree
functional testing would be to move these kinds of tests into the projects and
run the tests from the project repos instead of from tempest.

This would have the advantage of making tempest slimmer for every project
and begin the process of getting projects to take responsibility for their
functional testing rather than relying on tempest. As tests are moved tempest
can start to become the integration test suite it was meant to be. It would
retain only tests that involve multiple projects and stop being the OpenStack
black box testing suite. I think that this is the right direction for tempest
moving forward, especially as we move to having project-specific functional
testing.

Doing this migration is dependent on some refactors in tempest and moving
the required bits to tempest-lib so they can be easily consumed by the
other projects. This will be discussed at summit, is being planned
for implementation this cycle, and is similar to what is currently in progress
for the cli tests.

The only reason this testing existed in tempest in the first place was as
mechanism to block and then add friction against breaking api changes. Tempest's
api testing has been been pretty successful at achieving these goals. We'll want
to ensure that migrated tests retain these characteristics. If we are using
clients from tempest-lib we should get this automatically since to break
the api you'd have to change the api client. Another option proposed was to
introduce a hacking rule that would block changes to api tests at the same time
other code was being changed.

There is also a concern for external consumers of tempest if we move the tests
out of the tempest tree (I'm thinking refstack). I think the solution is
to maintain a load_tests discovery method inside of tempest or elsewhere that
will run the appropriate tests from the other repos for something like refstack.
Assuming that things are built in a compatible way using the same framework then
running the tests from separate repos should be a simple matter of pointing the
test runner in the right direction.

I also want to comment on the role of functional testing. What I've proposed
here is only one piece of what project specific functional testing should be
and just what I feel is a good/easy start. I don't feel that this should be
the only testing done in the projects.  I'm suggesting this as a first
step because the tests already exist and it should be a relatively simple task.
I also feel that using tempest-lib like this shouldn't be a hard requirement.
Ideally the client definitions shouldn't have to live externally, or if they did
they would be the official clients, but I am suggesting this as a first step to
start a migration out of tempest.

I don't want anyone to feel that they need block their functional testing
efforts until tempest-lib becomes more useable. The larger value from functional
testing is actually in enabling testing more tightly coupled to the projects
(e.g. whitebox testing). I feel that any work necessary to enable functional
testing should be prioritized.


-Matt Treinish
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