Please join me in welcoming the DX Team

A few weeks ago, I posted a call out for people to reach out and commit to participate for 8+ weeks.  There were two projects and one of them was Developer Experience.  Since then we have had some great interest, there are 5 awesome contributors participating (sorted by irc nicks).

BYK – I met BYK 3+ years ago on IRC- he is a great person and very ambitious.  As a more senior developer he will be focused primarily on improving interactions with mach.  While there are a lot of little things to make mach better, BYK proposed a system to collect information about how mach is used.

gma_fav – I met gma_fav on IRC when she heard about the program.  She has a lot of energy, seems very detail oriented, asks good questions, and brings fresh ideas to the team!  She is a graduate of the Ascend project and is looking to continue her growth in development and open source.  Her primary focus will be on the interface to try server (think the try chooser page, extension, and taking other experiments further).

kaustabh93 – I met Kaustabh on IRC about a year ago and since then he has been a consistent friend and hacker.  He attends university.  In fact I do owe him credit for large portions of alert manager.  While working on this team, he will be focused on making run-by-dir a reality.  There are two parts: getting the tests to run green, and reducing the overhead of the harness.

sehgalvibhor – I met Vibhor on IRC about 2 weeks ago.  He was excited about the possibility of working on this project and jumped right in.  Like Kaustabh, he is a student who is just finishing up exams this week.  His primary focus this summer will be working in a similar role to Stanley in making our test harnesses act the same and more useful.

stanley – When this program was announced Stanley was the first person to ping me on IRC.  I have found him to be very organized, a pleasure to chat with and he understands code quite well.  Coding and open source are both new things to Stanley and we have the opportunity to give him a great view of it.  Stanley will be focusing on making the commands we have for running tests via mach easier to use and more unified between harnesses.

Personally I am looking forward to seeing the ambition folks have translate into great solutions, learning more about each person, and sharing with Mozilla as a whole the great work they are doing.

Take a few moments to say hi to them online.

browser-chrome is greener and in many chunks

On Friday we rolled out a big change to split up our browser-chrome tests.  It started out as a great idea to split the devtools out into their own suite, then after testing, we ended up chunking the remaining browser chrome tests into 3 chunks.

No more 200 minute wait times, in fact we probably are running too many chunks.  A lot of heavy lifting took place, a lot of it in releng from Armen and Ben, and much work from Gavin and RyanVM who pushed hard and proposed great ideas to see this through.

What is next?

There are a few more test cases to fix and to get all these changes on Aurora.  We have more work we want to do (lower priority) on running the tests differently to help isolate issues where one test affects another test.

In the next few weeks I want to put together a list of projects and bugs that we can work on to make our tests more useful and reliable.  Stay tuned!

 

Android automation is becoming more stable ~7% failure rate

At Mozilla we have made our unit testing on android devices to be as important as desktop testing. Earlier today I was asked how do we measure this and what is our definition of success. The obvious answer is no failures except for code that breaks a test, but reality is something where we allow for random failures and infrastructure failures. Our current goal is 5%

So what are these acceptable failures and what does 5% really mean. Failures can happen when we have tests which fail randomly, usually poorly written tests or tests which have been written a long time ago and hacked to work in todays environment. This doesn’t mean any test that fails is a problem, it could be a previous test that changes a Firefox preference on accident. For Android testing, this currently means the browser failed to launch and load the test webpage properly or it crashed in the middle of the test. Other failures are the device losing connectivity, our host machine having hiccups, the network going down, sdcard failures, and many other problems. With our current state of testing this mostly falls into the category of losing connectivity to the device. For infrastructure problems they are indicated as Red or Purple and for test related problems they are Orange.

I took at a look at the last 10 runs on mozilla-central (where we build Firefox nightlies from) and built this little graph:

Firefox Android Failures

Here you can see that our tests are causing 6.67% of the failures and 12.33% of the time we can expect a failure on Android.

We have another branch called mozilla-inbound (we merge this into mozilla-central regularly) where most of the latest changes get checked in.  I did the same thing here:

mozilla-inbound Android Failures

Here you can see that our tests are causing 7.77% of the failures and 9.89% of the time we can expect a failure on Android.

This is only a small sample of the tests, but it should give you a good idea of where we are.

Automation found its first regression for Fennec!

Yesterday I noticed our Mochitest-1 test was orange (since Nov 17th…still need to train others to watch the results), so I spent a few minutes looking into it and it turned out to be a regression (which was promptly fixed by the mobile guys!)  I know automation has uncovered errors in the past, but this is the first time we have had automation that was truly green for a week (we just turned it on) and then turned orange as the result of a unfriendly patch.

 

mochikit.jar changes are in mozilla central

Last night we landed the final patches to make mochikit.jar a reality.  This started out as a bug where we would package all the mochikit harness + chrome tests into a single .jar file and then on a remote system copy that to the application directory and run the tests locally.  It ended up being much more than that, let me explain some of the changes that have taken place.

why change all of this?

In order to test remotely (on mobile devices such as windows mobile and android) where there are not options to run tools and python scripts, we need to put everything in the browser that it needs and launch the browser remotely.  The solution for tests that are not accessible over the network is to run them from local files.

what is mochikit.jar?

Mochikit.jar is an extension that is installed in the profile and contains all the core files that mochitest (plain, chrome, browser-chrome, a11y) needs to run in a browser.  This doesn’t contain any of the external tools such as ssltunnel and python scripts to set up a webserver.  When you do a build, you will see a new directory in $(objdir)/_tests/testing/mochitest called mochijar.  Feel free to poke around there.  As a standalone application all chrome://mochikit/content calls will use this extension, not a pointer to the local file system.  The original intention of mochkit.jar was to include tests data, but we found that to create an extension using jar.mn we needed a concrete list of files and that was not reasonable to do for our test files.  So we created tests.jar.

what is tests.jar?

tests.jar is the actual test data for browser-chrome, chrome, and a11y tests.  These are all tests that are not straightforward to access remotely over http, so we are running these locally out of a .jar file.  tests.jar is only created when you do a ‘make package-tests’ and ends up in the root of the mochitest directory as tests.jar.  If the harness finds this file, it copies it to the profile and generates a .manifest file for the .jar file, otherwise we generate a plain .manifest file to point to the filesytem.  Finally we dynamically registers tests.manifest from the profile.  Now all your tests will have a chrome://mochitests/content instead of chrome://mochikit/content.

What else changed?

A lot of tests had to change to work with this because we had hardcoded chrome://mochikit/content references in our test code and data.  It is fine to have that in there for references to the harness and core utilities, but to reference a local piece of test data, it was hardcoded and didn’t need to be.  A few tests required some more difficult work where we had to extract files temporarily to a temp folder in the profile and reference them with a file path.

what do I need to do when writing new tests?

please don’t cut and paste code then change it to reference a data, utility, or other uri that has chrome://mochikit/content/ in it.  If you need to access a file with the full URI or as a file path, here are some tips:

* a mochitest-chrome test that needs to reference a file in the same directory or subdir:
let chromeDir = getRootDirectory(window.location.href);

* a browser-chrome test that needs to reference a file in the same directory or subdir:
//NOTE: gTestPath is set because window.location.href is not always set on browser-chrome tests
let chromeDir = getRootDirectory(gTestPath);

* extracting files to temp and accessing them

  let rootDir = getRootDirectory(gTestPath);
  let jar = getJar(rootDir);
  if (jar) {
    let tmpdir = extractJarToTmp(jar);
    rootDir = "file://" + tmpdir.path + '/';
  }
  loader.loadSubScript(rootDir + "privacypane_tests.js", this);

accessing privileged content from a normal webpage, request for example

One project which I am working on is getting mochitests to run in fennec + electrolysis.  Why this is a project is we don’t allow web pages to access privileged information in the browser anymore.  Mochitests in the simplest form use file logging and event generation.

The communication channel that is available between the ‘chrome’ and ‘content’ process is the messageManager protocol.  There are even great examples of using this in the unit tests for ipc.  Unfortunately I have not been able to load a normal web page and allow for my extension which used messageManager calls to interact.

I think what would be nice to see is a real end to end example of an extension that would demonstrate functionality on any given webpage.  This would be helpful to all addon authors, not just me:)  If I figure this out, I will update with a new blog post.

filtering mochitests for remote testing

One major problem we encounter in running all our unittests on Fennec is the large volume of failures and how to manage them.  Currently we have turned off mochitests on the Maemo tinderbox because nobody looked at the results (we still run reftest/crashtest/xpcshell!)

In many of my previous posts, I outlined methods for running tests remotely and that has proven to be very useful.  In order to test this code and continue developing it (without windows mobile or a working android build yet), I have developed a simple python test-agent that can run on a linux box (including n900.)  If you are curious, check it out and watch tests run remotely…it is pretty cool.

So the real problem I need to solve is how to not run a list of tests on a mobile device.  Solving this could get us to green faster and reduce the mochitest runtime in half!

In 2008 my solution was Maemkit.  Maemkit is just a small wrapper around the python test runner scripts that does some file (renaming) and directory (splitting into smaller chunks) manipulation to allow for more reliable test runs.  This has worked great and still works.  Enter remote testing and we need to hack up Maemkit a lot to accommodate for everything.  In addition a lot of the work maemkit does is already in the test runners.

Today I have moved the filtering to be a bit more configurable and less obscure.  This is really just a prototype and toolset to solve a problem for me locally, but the idea is something worth sharing.  What I have done is built up a json file (most of this was done automatically with this parsing script) which outlines the test and has some ‘tags’ that I can filter on:

   {
     "fennec-tags" : {"orange": "", "remote": "", "timeout": ""},
     "name" : "/tests/toolkit/content/tests/widgets/test_tooltip.xul"
   },
   {
     "fennec-results" : {"fail": 0, "todo": 0, "pass": 51},
     "name" : "/tests/MochiKit_Unit_Tests/test_MochiKit-Async.html",
     "note" : []
   }

You can see I now can run or skip tests that are tagged ‘orange’ or ‘timeout’. Better yet, I can skip tests with fennec-results that match fail > 0 if I want everything to be green.

So I took this a bit further since I wanted to turn these on or off depending on if I wanted to run tests or to investigate bugs, and I allowed for a filter language to be parsed in mochitest/tests/SimpleTest/setup.js.  I then modified my runtestsremote.py (subclass of runtests.py) so when launching mochitest from the command line I could control this like:

#run all tests that match the 'orange' tag
python runtestsremote.py --filter='run:fennec-tags(orange)'

#skip all tests that have the timeout tag
python runtestsremote.py --filter='skip:fennec-tags(timeout)'

#skip all tests that have failures > 0
python runtestsremote.py --filter='skip:fennec-results(fail>0)'

You should now see the power of this filtering and that with some more detailed thinking we could have a powerful engine to run what we want.  Of course this can run on regular mochitest (if you take the code in this patch from runtestsremote.py and add it to runtests.py.in) and run all the orange tests in a loop or something like that.

As a note, I previously mentioned a parsing script.   With some cleanup you could automatically create this json filter file based on tinderbox runs and fill in the tags to identify scenarios like orange (failing sometimes), timeouts, focus problems, etc…

Happy filtering!

patches checked in, tests can run on windows mobile!

My previous posts on the status of winmo automation outlined a series of patches to land. I am proud to say all of those have been reviewed (thanks to everybody), have landed (thanks ctalbert for checking these in) and with the help of this buildbot shim script are running very well!

So some highlights of what works:

• Mochitest: runs great on the phone, and we use the –total-chunks and –this-chunk options so we don’t run out of memory. Right now I am testing it with –total-chunks=20, but suspect we can go a bit lower. As another note, the overhead to restart the phone, install the build, load the browser, and start the tests is 7.5 minutes on my HTC touch pro
• Reftest/Crashtest/JSreftest: all of these run great. We need to run smaller manifest files though as after about 800 files on my device the tests come to a halt and execute maybe 1 test every few minutes. Luckily these run with manifest files so we can easily create a few manifests and have a working solution
• Xpcshell: this is pretty straightforward. I don’t see any problems running this end to end as the harness by design only runs one case at a time. As a note, this is the only test harness that copies over the test files to the phone.
• shim script: this turns on the webserver on your local IP so we can access it from the phone, as well as a bunch of other setup, monitoring and cleanup tasks. It would be nice to move the webserver functionality into the remote harness scripts in the near future so developers can easily run from a build tree
• sutagent: this is actually the backbone of these tests. This tool runs on the phone and has come a long way over the last few months. This agent is a product of blassey and bmoss. The next steps here are to get the code checked into one of our source trees.

There are a few things we want to clean up, but overall we are at a great milestone on this project and ready to start rolling this out.

making the most of unittests on a phone

Background:
As we get closer to having unittests running on windows mobile, I am starting to wonder how long it will take to complete a test run. Just like maemo with the n810’s we will be running the tests in parallel, but can we see full build + test + results in < 8 hours for a nightly?

For desktop builds, we have an enormous amount of building and testing that we do. This means we would be running tests for about 512 checkins/month (just less than 1/hour) and double that if we wanted to include the try server.

Proposal:
What I propose doing is running a small set of unittests on each checkin, such that we get simple coverage on each build and it runs fast enough so we have results in the same time window as our other test data comes in for desktop tests. Right now when you check into m-c or 1.9.2 tests are only run on desktop builds, this would run tests on windows mobile as well.

The big question is what tests to run. Here are a couple ideas:

1. Run a small smoketest for each test suite (reftest, mochitest, xpcshell) which covers different areas, but not as in depth. Save the full test for the nightlies
2. Iterate through a series of chunks (say 30 chunks for mochitest; desktop builds split it 5 ways) and for each checkin just run a single chunk. After the course of 2 days we will have done a full cycle of little chunks.

Personally I like the second option best, but really I am trying to think out of the box for ways to reduce regression windows while getting feedback on a per checkin basis. What do you think?

updated status of the winmo automation project

A couple weeks ago, I posted an initial status of the winmo automation project. Here is an update of where we are.

• Talos: DONE
• Mochitest: There are 2 patches required for this to work:
  1. Fix tests to not use hardcoded localhost – need to land
  2. Add CLI options to mochitest for remote webserver – submitted for final review
• Reftest: This requires 3 patches
1. Modify reftest.jar to support http url for manifest and test files – up for review
2. Refactor runreftests.py – one issue while trying to land, need to land this in the next couple days
3. Add remotereftests.py still WIP – could be at review stage

I also have instructions for how to setup and run this.

• Xpcshell: this requires 2 patches
  1. Refactor runxpcshelltests.py to support subclass for winmo – submitted for final review
  2. Add remotexpcshelltests.pyup for initial review

  I have written some instructions on how to run xpcshell tests on winmo if you are interested.

Only a few patches have landed since the last update, but a lot of reviews have happened. Great progress has been made to resolve some of the unknown issues with running xpcshell and reftest remotely and everything is truly up for review. I expect next week at this time to have a much shorter list of patches.