I’d like to take a couple of minutes of your time to talk about testing of OpenStack. Swift has always had very good test coverage, and Glance also does pretty well, so I’ll mostly be focused on Nova.
(Psst… If you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing, just skip down to the how you can help section.)
Unit tests
Unit tests are by far the easiest to run. They’re right there in the development tree, a simple ./run_tests.sh away. You don’t need a complicated hardware setup, just a source code checkout.
They each exercise a small portion of the code in isolation to verify that they live up to their “contract”. More often than not, this contract is implicit. There’s no documentation of its input, output, or side effects, and maybe there doesn’t have to be. In many cases things get split up simply for readability reasons (larger routines that have grown out of control get split into smaller chunks) or to ease testing, so they’re not actually written expecting to be called from anywhere else. Documentation for all these things would be *awesome*, but a unit test should be the minimum required.
Functional tests
Unit tests are great. However, verifying that each piece of the puzzle does what it says on the tin is of little use if putting them all together doesn’t actually do what you set out to achieve. This is where we use functional tests. An example might be verifying that when you invoke a frontend API method that is supposed to start a virtual machine, a virtual machine actually ends up getting started in a mock hypervisor with all the correct things having been put in place along the way.
In my experience, almost every time an issue is caught by this type of test, it’s an indication that the unit tests are either wrong (e.g. when X goes into a particular routine, it checks that Y comes out, but for everything else to work, Z was actually supposed to come out) or don’t test all the edge cases. So, while a failure at this level should probably involve fixing up (or adding new) unit tests, these tests are indispensable. They verify the cooperation between the various internals, which is easy to miss when staring at each tiny little part in isolation (particularly in a piece of software like Nova that is full of side effects).
(In Nova, functional and unit tests all live in the same test suite)
Integration tests
Unit and black box tests are great, but what end users see is what really matters. If someone deploys all the various OpenStack components and put them together and something ultimately doesn’t work, we’ve failed. It’s all been futile.
Integration tests are often the easiest to write. When dealing with internals, it’s easy to punt on a lot of things like “should this method take this or that as an argument?,” “ideally, this db call shouldn’t live here, but it’ll have to do for now,” etc., but when it comes to what the end users sees, everything must have an answer. We can’t not have firm, concrete, simple, long-lived answers to questions like: “If I want to start a virtual machine, what do I do?,” “which argument comes first for this API call?,” etc. Hence, writing tests that start a virtual machine and then later makes sure that it started properly is rather forgiving. It’s also reassuring to end-users to know that their exact use cases are verified to work.
Again, ideally nothing should ever be caught here. If it does, it means that something slipped through a crack left by both the unit tests and black-box tests, or maybe the real KVM doesn’t act like we expected when we wrote its mock counterpart. Everything caught here should end up in a unit test somewhere once the culprit has been found.
Where do we stand today?
Unit and functional tests
As mentioned, nova’s source tree includes a test suite, comprised of both unit and functional tests. We have a Jenkins job that tracks how much of Nova is being exercised by the test suite. At the time of this writing, we have around 74% coverage. Bear in mind that if a particular line is exercised by either a unit test or a functional test (or both, of course). At our last design summit, we agreed that we’d work on improving this coverage, but clearly there’s a long way to go (that number should be in the (very) high nineties).
Integration tests
As for integration tests, there are a number of separate efforts:
- Stacktester
- Kong
- Nova’s own smoketests
- Very likely even more.. (please let me know if you have something similar running somewhere)
Where are we going? (a.k.a. how you can help)
Unit and functional tests
I think this is easily where we have the most work to do. Jenkins keeps track of what is covered and what isn’t:
There’s clearly lots of room for improvement. I’d like to encourage anyone who cares about QA to grab a random bit of code that isn’t yet covered by tests and add a test for it. Feel free to start with anything small and seemingly insignificant. We need to get the ball rolling. Small changes also makes the review easier.
I’ve started going through our coverage report and filing bugs about missing unit tests. Some are just a few simple statements that need tests, others are entire modules that are almost testless. Take a look and feel free to get in touch if you need help getting started.
Integration tests
Over the next month or so, we’re hoping to collect all these efforts (and any others out there, so please let me know!) into one. The goal is to have a common set of tests that we can run against an OpenStack intallation (i.e. all the various components that make up an actual deployment) to get early warning if something should break in a particular configuration. So, if you have anything set up to automatically test OpenStack, please get in touch. If there’s a particular configuration you care about, we want to make sure we don’t break it, so we need your help finding a good way to deploy bleeding edge OpenStack code onto your test installation and run a bunch of tests against it.