Dan, Jon,
I got caught up in meetings yesterday – you'll see this email a lot during Q4 ;) – so I delayed sending this email, so forgive the repetitions of some of Dan's points/questions:
Here are a few ways I can think of:
- include feedback on browser tests – or lack thereof – during code
review
- make browser test failures even more visible than they currently are
– but maybe not the success reports, eh?
- can these reports be made to point at a bunch of candidate changes
that may have broken 'em?
- hold a browser-test-athon with the team and any volunteers at the
{Lyon,Wikimania} hackathon
- make it trivial to run 'em, if it isn't already
From what little experience I have of trying to establish team practices,
I'd say that it's best to advocate for <practice> and demonstrate its value*, rather than criticise. I'd love to see you funnel your passion for browser testing into a talk or series of talks for the mobile team – the org, maybe? – or maybe you've got some recommended reading or talks you'd like to share that'll inspire.
–Sam
* If you'd like to hear my opinions about browser testing, then insert one beer and wind me up a little
On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 8:47 PM, Dan Duvall dduvall@wikimedia.org wrote:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94472
On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Dan Duvall dduvall@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:30 AM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com
wrote:
It really saddens me how very few engineers seem to care about browser tests. Our browser tests are failing all over the place. I just saw
this bug
[1] which has been sitting around for ages and denying us green tests in Echo one of our most important features.
How can we change this anti-pattern?
That's exactly what I'd like to explore with you and other like minds.
Dan Duval, would it make sense to do a survey as you did with Vagrant to understand how our developers think of these? Such as who owns them...
who
is responsible for a test failing... who writes them... who doesn't understand them.. why they don't understand them etc...?
Great idea! I suspect that the number of false positives in a given repo's test suite is inversely related to the number of developers on the team actually writing tests, and the affordance by managers to do so. If you're not regularly writing tests, you're probably not going to feel comfortable troubleshooting and refactoring someone else's. If TDD isn't factored in to your team's velocity, you may feel like the investment in writing tests (or learning to write them) isn't worth it or comes at the risk of missing deadlines.
A survey could definitely help us to verify (or disprove) these
relationships.
Some other questions I can think of:
- How valuable are unit tests to the health/quality of a software
project?
- How valuable are browser tests to the health/quality of a software
project?
- How much experience do you have with TDD?
- Would you like more time to learn or practice TDD?
- How often do you write tests when developing a new feature?
- What kinds of test? (% of unit test vs. browser test)
- How often do you write tests to verify a bugfix?
- What kinds of test? (% of unit test vs. browser test)
- When would you typically write a unit test? (before implementation,
after implementation, when stuff breaks)
- When would you typically write a browser test? (during conception,
before implementation, after implementation, when stuff breaks)
- What are the largest barriers to writing/running unit tests? (test
framework, documentation/examples, execution time, CI, structure of my code, structure of code I depend on)
- What are the largest barriers to writing/running browser tests?
(test framework, documentation/examples, execution time, CI)
- What are the largest barriers to debugging test failure? (test
framework, confusing errors/stack traces, documentation/examples, debugging tools)
I'll create a Phab task to track it. :)
-- Dan Duvall Automation Engineer Wikimedia Foundation
-- Dan Duvall Automation Engineer Wikimedia Foundation
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