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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94472
On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Dan Duvall <dduvall(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:30 AM, Jon Robson
<jdlrobson(a)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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