Open Stack

On 05/13/2013 12:51 PM, Sean Dague wrote:
> On 05/13/2013 02:52 PM, James E. Blair wrote:
>> Sean Dague <sean at dague.net> writes:
>>
>>> Any assistance would be good.
>>>
>>> Right now we really just need 'gate' attr added to basically all the
>>> non skipped methods, we can prune later. Once 'gate' looks to be ~
>>> full, we can flip over check and gate to use that.
>>>
>>> I think long term the approach we're going to need to go with is 3
>>> sets of tests:
>>>
>>> smoke (< 10 mins)
>>> gate (< 45 mins)
>>> full (everything)
>>>
>>> All projects gate on gate
>>>
>>> Periodic runs of full - daily, more often?
>>>
>>> Tempest check runs full (but not gate), it's advisory.
>>>
>>> Some on demand facility for people to run full.
>>>
>>> At this point I'm not adding my +2 to any more tests (only approving
>>> fixes to existing tests) until we get gate tag in, as I don't think we
>>> should be running any longer than we currently are.
>>
>> We discussed this at the summit, and while running fewer tests is
>> certainly one of the things we can do, I don't remember consensus that
>> it was our first priority.
> 
> It's not really about running fewer tests, it's about test growth.
> Tempest isn't just a tool for the gate, lots of people want to use it on
> their clouds. So at some point we do need to divorce the gate set from
> the whole set. Otherwise the tolerable length of the OpenStack gate
> limits the content people can contribute to test their real world clouds.
> 
> We already have instances of this, stress tests, which are in tempest
> but not in the gate. David and I had some lunch time conversations about
> this one day and I think that we were both of the mindset that:
>  * not everything in tempest has to be in the gate
>  * however, everything in tempest has to get run on some interval for
> bitrot reasons (which we aren't currently doing)

I think we're still suffering from diverging assumptions about some
things. IMO, there are three types of tests:

functional tests - test that a thing works
stress tests - hammer the thing to make sure it can handle load
performance regression tests - check that this commit performs as well
as the last one

We are fundamentally unequipped to run the second two in any meaningful
way as part of OpenStack Infra right now - and I think that's ok for
now. But let's ignore them for the rest of this - they're a topic for
future.

Our discussions about tests in the gate should at the moment be around
tests that test functionality and what to do with them.

I am of the opinion that we should run every single functionality test
we have at our disposal every time we run anything, because that's how
we ensure that OpenStack works, and that is the current purpose of and
scope of the gate.

>> We have a number of other things that we can do to reduce run-time that
>> I think we agreed should be a higher priority:
>>
>> A) Parallelize the test runner (move to testr).
>> B) Split the run into multiple jobs (XML vs JSON, etc).
>> C) Focus on flakey tests so that gate resets are less of a factor
>>     (reducing sensitivity to runtime).
>>
>> Note that work on both A and B independently facilitates C.
>>
>> I think the general direction we'd like to head is to run _more_ tests,
>> not less.  Further, I don't think that check jobs and gate jobs should
>> run different tests -- some people will learn to just ignore check jobs
>> and enqueue failing jobs into the gate (as people already ignore
>> non-voting jobs), resulting in more bad code landing.  It's also
>> optimizing the wrong pipeline -- developers are more sensitive to slow
>> check jobs than gate jobs.
>>
>> I got the impression that we all agreed that testr was the highest
>> priority for this, and I'd still like to see that land before we move on
>> to functional job splits.  Is that effort progressing?  What can we do
>> to help?
> 
> A is currently stalled for lack of anyone working on it for H1. Chris
> Yeoh was the driving force in Grizzly on this, but he's hard at work on
> the Nova v3 API right now. Matt Treinish's going to pick this up on H2
> if no one else steps forward.

Robert - can you provide some help here? It seems like we're blocking on
some engineering challenges that I believe might be easy for you.

> B currently has the issue that test criteria selection kind of sucks
> because of the lack of structure in the tempest tree. I'm currently
> working on this one to get it done by H1 -
> https://review.openstack.org/#/q/status:open+project:openstack/tempest+branch:master+topic:bp/tempest-repo-restructure,n,z
> 
> 
> C is currently probably a later in cycle task, just for time reasons.
> 
> So B we should be able to do ~ H1 timeframe, we'll have the test suite
> in chunks that are easy to run bits and pieces of.
> 
> A should be ~H2 (depending).
> 
> But that's still a lot of weeks where we have test case contributors
> largely blocked because run time is an issue. Having a gate tag that we
> can annotate is just another lever. It also provides us with an excuse
> to get the multi tag support into the test cases, because developers
> really do want to run things like:

I agree, A and B are both important, and separate tasks.

I don't agree that run time is an issue, actually, and if that is an
assertion we're operating under, I'd like to dig more in to why. The
tests have been running between 45 minutes and 1.5 hours for the past 6
months. I don't think that waiting another chunk of weeks is going to
kill us, and I don't think we should not accept new test cases because
of a run time limit. If we need to bump the gate timeout because the run
time is legitimately increased, that's not hard to do.

If at all possible, I'd really like to get things sorted without gating
less.

> ./run_tests.sh -t cinder  (or something similar)
> 
> And get just the slice of tests that has a cinder interaction.
> 
>     -Sean
>