Within a short-time period I'm going to start a project based on Windows Azure. And I was wondering what are the experiences with testing for Windows Azure projects (in continuous intergration (with a TFS build server))? (Eventual using TDD)
Some things I was wondering:
Do you use mocking (in your own written wrapper class)?
Do you use the storage emulator?
Do you deploy the services to Azure and run the tests from the build server to the cloud? (what about costs)?
Thnaks in advance!
The same good practices for writing unit tests for applications outside of Windows Azure apply. If you have an external dependency to what you are actually testing, that dependency should be mocked and injected for your granular unit test.
For example, when I'm using Windows Azure Storage Queues I will have an interface that I use to interact with the queue itself, so in my code consuming the queue service I can mock the subsystem using the interface and use dependency injection to inject the mock. This removes the necessity to actually deal with the emulator during unit tests. For the most part the actual concrete implementation of the code working with the queue is not much more than a very thin wrapper.
I personally don't shoot for 100% test coverage, so I may not have direct unit tests that utilize the concrete implementation of the wrappers. In many cases I try to have integration tests that will exercise these wrappers and exercise multiple aspects of the system working together. In some cases I can run the integration tests in the emulator (for Storage operations for example), but in some cases they simply have to be run with access to the Windows Azure environment (in the case of usage of ACS or Service Bus).
Ideally you'd like to have a set of scripts that can be run to spin up a minimum set of test servers in Azure, deploy your solution and exercise the integration tests that can't be done on premises. Then get the results of that and have the script shut everything down (or optionally leave it running if you need that). Then run the integration tests suite that utilizes these scripts often enough to detect issues, but you certainly don't need to run them every time you check something in unless you are happy with running the test environment all the time. If you okay with the cost of a semi-permanent test environment running in Azure then just make sure to have the scripts to an update deployment rather than a delete and redeploy to cut down on cost a bit (savings would be relative to how often the deploy occurs).
I believe this question is a very subjective one as you're likely to get several different opinions.
Related
The question is more about the fundamental understanding of a normal/ideal CI flow and understanding the scope of integration testing in it.
As per my understanding, the basic CI CD flow is
UnitTesting --> IntegrationTesting --> Build Artifact --> Deploy to Dev/Sandbox or any other subsequent environments.
So unit tetsing and integration testing collectively decide/make sure if the build is stable and ready to be deployed.
But, recently, we had this discussion in my team where we wanted to run integration tests on deployed instances on Dev/Sandbox etc , so as to verify if the application is working fine after deployment.
And the microsoft's article on Build - Deploy - Test workflows suggests that this could be a possible way.
So , my questions are :-
Are integration tests supposed to test configuration of different environments ?
Are integration tests supposed to be run before packaging application or deploying the application ?
If at all, some automated testing is required to test deployed application functioning on all environments ?
If not integration tests then what could be alternative solutions
You're mixing Integration testing with System testing.
Integration testing checks that some components can work together (can be integrated). You may have integration tests to verify how does the Data layer API operates with a database; or how does the the Web API responds to HTTP calls. You might not have the entire system completely working in order to do integration testing of its components.
Unlike integration tests, the System tests require all the components to be implemented and configured. That is end-to-end testing (e.g. from a web request to a database record). This kind of testing requires the entire system to be deployed which makes them more 'real' but expensive.
I work on a project with a lot of legacy code that has some tests (in JUnit). Those unit tests are pretty slow and running them often slows me down. I plan on refactoring and optimizing them (so they're real unit tests), but before I do this, I'd like to speed them up just for now, by running them in parallel. Of course I could get myself some cluster and run them there, but that's not worth the hassle and the money. Is it possible to do so with some cloud services like e.g. Amazon AWS? Can you recommend me some articles where I could read more about it?
Running unit tests in parallel requires 2 things:
Creating groups of multiple tests using either suites or JUnit categories
A way to launch each group of tests
Once you have #1, an easy way to get #2 is to use Continuous Integration.
Do you already use Continuous Integration ?
If not, it is easy to add. One of the more popular ones is Jenkins
Jenkins also supports distributed builds where a master code launches build jobs on slave nodes. You could use this to run each of your groups in parallel.
Continuous Integration in the Cloud
Once you have Continuous Integration set up, you can move it into the cloud if you wish.
If you want to stick with jenkins, you can use
Cloud Bees which costs money
Red Hat Openshift "Gears" can be used to run Jenkins. I think it is possible to use gears in Amazon WS but I've never done it. You can run a few gears with limited memory usage for free, but if you need more it will cost money.
If you don't want to use Jenkins, there are other cloud based CIs including
Travis-CI which integrates with github. Here is an article about how to speed up builds in Travis
When developing, my team obviously uses development as our environment.
When we run automated tests, we use testing.
We also have staging and production environments, respectively used for our testers to check out features and the final "live" product.
We're trying to setup an internal CI server to run our automated tests against and to eventually assist with automated deployments.
Since the CI server is really running automated tests, some think it should be run in testing environment. However, in order for the CI server to actually be useful, my thoughts are that it needs to be run in production mode with as close-as-possible a mirror of the actual production environment (without touching the production DB, obviously).
Is there an accepted environment that a CI server should be executed under? production environment (with different DB) seems the only logical answer to me, but I may be missing something...
Running any tests on PROD environment as you said
seems the only logical answer
but is not quite true. There are risks that your tests can seriously damage the actual environment/application to a point where you'll face a recovery option. After all the dark side of testing is to show/find that your software has not only minor bugs and it is working not as expected.
I can think of at least these 'why not test production' considerations:
when the product is launched, the customer rely on it. Expecting that your software is working ()being already tested). Your live environment should do its job and not be loaded with tests. If the product misbehaved (or did not perform), the technical team have to be sent to to cover the damage, fix the gaps and make it run hassle free. Now this not only affected the product cost, but delayed the project deadlines in a major way. This will make a recursive effect at the vendors profits and next few projects.
the production or development team when completes a product development at their end, have to produce this test environment for testing team prior to loading their newly developed product on that environment for testing.
To me, no matter that you
also have staging and production environments
it is essential to use the Test one accordingly. Further more Testing environment should be (configured) as close as it gets to the Production. Also one person could be trying to test while another person breaks the thing that he has been testing. With out the two being separate their is no way to do proper testing.
Just to be full answer, your STAGE environment can have different roles depending on the company.
One is that it can be the QA/STAGE environment that has an exact copy of production which is used for both QA and system testing (testing of the system when a lot of updates/changes or upgrade is going to go into production).
UPDATE:
That was my point too. The QA environment should be a mirror of the PROD. Possible solution about your issue with caching/pre-loading files onto staging/production is creation of pre-/post-steps .bat (let's assume) files.
In our current Test project we use this approach. In pre-steps we set-up files needed for test execution (like removing files from previous runs and downloading latest copies/artifacts). In post-steps we set up reporting files needed.The advantage is that your files will be collected and sync before every execution.
About the
not on the same physical hardware
in my case we support dedicated remote Test server. Advantages are clear, only thing that you need to be considered is that it'll require maintenance (administration).
In a J2EE web application, how do people manage resources so that they are visible to both the web context and to unit/integration tests?
I find that often you end up having your source/resource folders configured a certain way during development (i.e., what Maven expects) and so your unit tests will run in your IDE. But once the web app is built and packaged into a WAR file (i.e., when your Continuous Integration server has done a build) your unit tests won't run anymore because the resources are located elsewhere.
Do you end up keeping resources in two different places and manually keeping them in sync?
We tried using unit tests in the container but gave up on it years ago. It's much better (for us at least) to make each unit test cover a single class and nothing else, mocking out the dependencies on other classes (see JMock or its many competitors). A good basic rule is that if it touches the database, network, or the filesystem, it isn't a unit test. (It may be useful for something else, but it isn't a unit test. See these unit testing rules for more on this.)
Unit tests written this way can be run anywhere, and they are blazingly fast (we have thousands and run them in under 60 seconds on medium-spec hardware.)
You may also want to run integration tests that check a subsystem or the whole application. We find that subsystem tests can also use mocking at their borders - for instance, we fake an external pricing feed - and that end-to-end tests work best with tools like Selenium or WebDriver, which let you deploy the whole application on a server and then hit it with a browser just like users do.
(By the way, our method of unit testing makes us mockists, rather than classicists, in Martin Fowler's taxonomy.)
Normally this is the reason for multi-module builds. The external services are in a separate build unit than the web application. So you build, package and run your integrations tests when you build that module.
Another module can contain your domain model and its unit tests, which are also run at build time.
It is quite common for a module that results in a WAR to not have any java code in it at all, but only web related artifacts. Although not necessary, this is often done because code that is in a war module cannot be included into another module.
The last special case is the module containing web-tests. This module may often need test-scoped artifacts from the other modules (because it is testing the application from the outside, but may need data from the inside). This can be solves by also packaging test-resources in jar files, creating a separate set of "test" jar files for each modules.
Multi module builds are the norm for maven projects, and are also easy to set up for other build systems like ant.
I won't package testing resources nor tests in a WAR file neither run unit tests from the WAR. Why you are trying to do so?
I'm familiar with TDD and use it in both my workplace and my home-brewed web applications. However, every time I have used TDD in a web application, I have had the luxury of having full access to the web server. That means that I can update the server then run my unit tests directly from the server. My question is, if you are using a third party web host, how do you run your unit tests on them?
You could argue that if your app is designed well and your build process is sound and automated, that running unit tests on your production server isn't necessary, but personally I like the peace of mind in knowing that everything is still "green" after a major update.
For everyone who has responded with "just test before you deploy" and "don't you have a staging server?", I understand where you're coming from. I do have a staging server and a CI process set up. My unit tests do run and I make sure they all pass before an an update to production.
I realize that in a perfect world I wouldn't be concerned with this. But I've seen it happen before. If a file is left out of the update or a SQL script isn't run, the effects are immediately apparent when running your unit tests but can go unnoticed for quite some time without them.
What I'm asking here is if there is any way, if only to satisfy my own compulsive desires, to run a unit test on a server that I cannot install applications on or remote into (e.g. one which I will only have FTP access to in order to update files)?
I think I probably would have to argue that running unit tests on your production server isn't really part of TDD because by the time you deploy to your production environment technically speaking, you're past "development".
I'm quite a stickler for TDD, and when I'm preaching the benefits to clients I often find myself saying "you can't half adopt TDD, it's all or nothing"
What you probably should have is some form of automated testing that you perform "after" deployment but these are not part of TDD.
Maybe you should look at your process again.
You could write functional tests in something like WATIR, WATIN or Selenium that test what is returned in the reponse page after posting certain form data or requesting specific URLs.
For clarification: what sort of access do you have to your web server? FTP or WebDAV only? From your question, I'm guessing ssh access isn't available - you're dropping files in a directory to deploy. Is that correct?
If so, the answer for unit testing is likely 'do it before you deploy'. You can set up functional testing driven by an automated tool like Selenium to test your app remotely via the web interface, but that's not really unit testing the sense that you're restricted to testing the system as a whole.
Have you considered setting up a staging server, perhaps as a VMWare instance, that mirrors or at least mimics your deployment environment?
What's preventing you from running unit tests on the server? If you can upload your production code and let it run there, why can't you upload this other code and run it as well?
I've written test tools for sites using python and httplib/urllib2 generally it would have been overkill but it was suitable in these cases. Not sure it's going to be of general use though.