I thought I understood that a smoke server was used for continous integration to measure the performance and test coverage of a project. Is this basically correct? What does it mean to smoke-test a program? Does it simply mean to continously apply the tests defined on the smoke server to be able to pinpoint performance degradation to a particular time frame?
This other question does describe the difference between sanity testing and smoke testing but does not ask to define smoke testing. This question is many years older than the reference question.
Smoke testing is a set of basic cheap to run tests that precede actual testing. It aims to verify that the build is deployed successfully and that all test env. aspects are running and ready for the actual test process. It saves you bringing the full extent of your testing wrath down a faulty build and just realizing that you have been testing on a bad env. or erroneously deployed build possibly too late.
Turn it on, see if any smoke comes out.
The term originates in hardware repair and has been applied to software. It's intended to be a quick test to see if the application "catches on fire" when run for the first time. As stated above it's just to make sure you don't waste a bunch of folks time by setting them loose on something that's obviously broken.
Smoke testing isn't performance testing or regression prevention testing.
Smoke testing is a set of your highest priority fully automated tests. Even if your regular build succeeds, it's possible for your product to be broken in very fundamental ways that make it 100% unusable. Smoke tests are designed to test that level of core functionality. A build that doesn't pass smoke tests is very likely to fail a majority of all of your automated tests.
If a smoke test fails that generally means that you're losing productivity because the build is not usable, can't be tested, etc. Smoke test failures tend to require immediate fixes, on the order of hours not days.
The important aspect about smoke tests is that they can be run quickly. You should ALWAYS be running smoke tests of some sort. Many groups have sufficient resources to run a larger suite of tests on their daily or continuous integration builds (which is goodness), but smoke tests should be considered the bare minimum.
The wikipedia page on smoke testing is actually quite good.
It includes a pointer to Steve McConnel's ("Code Complete") paper in the best practices section of IEEE Software 13(4), 1996 titled "Daily Build and Smoke Test".
I'd say smoke testing is a precondition to unit and other forms of testing: if the smoke test fails there's no point in even starting up a unit test.
We use the term smoke test to refer to a testing that does quick basic tests to an application or product to make it qualify for further testing like integration testing or functionality testing. It is of little use to do integration testing or other adavanced testing if the application fails to do some of the elementary things required for these advanced testing. For instance we have a web based application and we do smoke test to ensure we can load all the web pages, lets users to login/logout etc. These are the basic things that should work with the application to make it testable. If the pages do not even load or if the users could not even login, we cannot do much with functionality or integration testing. We do smoke testing with every build followed by functionality and integration testing.
Smoke testing is the first step of integration testing. As a developer, you've put all the parts together and you're making sure your app will run before giving it to your QA team for "real" testing.
I wanted to write more, but MahdeTo beat me to a correct answer... :)
*checking the basic and critical feature of an application before proceeding the testing is known as smoke testing.
*In smoke testing we check the positive flow of basic and critical feature to check if the build is testable or not.
I agree with some of the previous answers. To me, Smoke Testing is simply a check if all my X thousands of sub-pages and redirects are still working.
Working means that the status code of each sub-page is "200 OK".
I run Smoke Tests as late as possible. After I deployed my code to the server and before I take this server active.
Today there is even an online service (SaaS) doing the job for me. https://www.smest.it helps me with Smoke Testing. I just entered once my private domain on their homepage and ever since I get my website checked daily. No stress at all.
Smoke testing can also be called build verification testing or build acceptance testing, if smoke testing fails it means build is not usable and can not be accepted , this defect needs to be fixed immediately on high priority
From Wikipedia
a smoke test may address basic questions like "does the program run?",
"does the user interface open?", or "does clicking the main button do
anything?" The process of smoke testing aims to determine whether the
application is so badly broken as to make further immediate testing
unnecessary.
Related
I’m working in a company that uses Continuous Integration (TeamCity). Every time someone does a check in the CI software starts a build and runs all the Unit/Automated Test . The problem is that we got more than 7000 unit tests + 756 automated tests (used to test the JavaScript as we got a very complex UI logic for making calculation etc). As you can imaging every time someone does a check in the all process takes more than 2 hours to go through all the steps (build-unitest-automated test) so that I need to wait that much before I can get a result to understand if my check in has broken perhaps an automated test or a unit test. Worst situation is when more than one people check in something so that TeamCity start queue up the build and before I can get a valid result (udated) I can wait up to half day ! what strategy should we adopt to speed up a bit this process? Is it a best practice run all the automated tests even against a little change?
I would look at breaking up your test suite in two ways - with the goal of making it so you and your team can check in, go get a cup of coffee and have some meaningful feedback from team city when you get back to your desk.
decide what you really want to test on every commit, move the remaining tests to a suite that runs at a scheduled interval (hourly, nightly - whatever works for you).
If the set of tests agreed upon to run every commit is still large - break that set up and distribute across multiple nodes running in parallel.
You may also want to beef up your CI machine, depending on the nature of your stuff have the working directory for the tests live in tmpfs (RAM disk).
I'm going to talk in theory, I have yet to put it into practice but CI is on my goals to have up and humming by the end of the summer.
From statements I've seen made by the people that have earned the most respect from me in developers the most common element for CI I've seen in regards to the testing strategy is to split your tests into Long Running and Short Running.
Then you would want to configure that standard check ins kick off the short running test for basic validation of the solution. Then on the nightly builds, and for deployment builds is the only time you NEED to run the full test suite to give your validation of regression tests.
Aside/Alternate answer: Seeing as I haven't setup CI for myself yet, I had never understood the TeamCity business model that they making the pricing based on build agents. Now I understand why multiple build agents really start to matter if your test suite takes that long, being able to run 5 builds at once becomes much more important. So one option could be to just spend more money and stick a band-aid on the bullet hole for now.
Continuous Integration works best with a distributed version control system like Git or Mercurial.
Every developer can check in often into their local repository without triggering the whole integration and UI testing ceremony all the time.
Once a feature is finished locally, it can be checked in to the central repository. Thus the CI server runs all the time-consuming tests only when new features and/or fixes have been added.
Have you considered using pre-tested commits? If you run a remote run build (without committing in to VCS), you can be sure that you didn't break anything in VCS (just because you didn't commit yet). And you can continue working without problems. If the build is successful, you can commit your change (even if you made some other changes in the same files) - if you commit via TeamCity's plugin it will commit exactly the code you sent to the server for the testing.
This way, you don't have to wait until TeamCity's build has finished to continue working with it.
Disclaimer: I'm a TeamCity developer.
We are working in a small team. We often had problems like developer1 did some changes in stored procedure or function and it affected work of developer2. Such issues are traced out by chance later. Please guide me how such issues can be stopped. Is there a free tool that we can run to test such issues?
Slowly introduce unit tests, focused integration tests and full system tests.
For all of those use a .net unit test framework to do it. It'll be what you do in the test what makes it be any of the above scenarios. Make sure to keep each of those 3 type of tests separately, as those will have a big difference on the speed it takes to execute them.
For the unit test framework I suggest NUnit but there are others, one that I've found interesting but never made the jump is xUnit.net.
For full system tests I suggest to run them in the unit test framework using WatiN. You could also go with Selenium RC.
We often had problems like developer1 did some changes in stored procedure or function and it affected work of developer2. Such issues are traced out by chance later.
For that specific type of scenario I strongly suggest focused integration tests. Full system tests might catch such scenario, but it will still left you to figure out why it broke.
Instead focus the test in the very specific db access code that makes the call to the procedure. By adding scenarios in there that reveal all the expectations developer2 had from said procedure when (s)he wrote the related .net code, regression issues with that integration code can be revealed very quickly and be dealt with very effectively. Also note that developer1 can easily run the focused integration tests that involve that procedure or area of the database many times / which is a lot more likely to happen than doing the same with full system tests.
You can do either automated unit testing using tools such as NUnit or automated black-box testing using tools such as Selenium. Note that both options (even with free tools) may need significant investment in terms of time and efforts. Typically, unit test cases are created by developers them selves while for automated black box testing, a separate team of QA is utilized - this is mostly because unit test cases are generally written in languages such as C#, VB.NET while automated black-box testing tools typically utilize scripting languages.
I started as a software engineer at the company I'm currently at. Over time, I was either the only one willing to or capable of taking responsibility for various systems, and so I was "promoted" to being IT Manager. Now, during my time as software engineer, I would create functional tests for the various software modules I would build, and as a result, even today I am able to quickly test various parts of the system that I have worked on. However, there is a large large code base with little to no coverage from the other various developers who have been working here.
Now, as IT Manager, I want to be able to test that all the parts of the system are working, but there is:
A) no budgeted time dedicated to creating code test coverage
and
B) No desire from the "chief software engineer" to start creating testing suites to help me monitor that the software is functioning.
I don't expect the software team to drop everything they are doing and spend 2 weeks creating test suites, but it would be nice if they started expanding the test suite
coverage over time so I can confirm that the various parts of the system are working.
So boiling it down, how do I get the software team to start building test suites?
Other caveats:
A) I'm still asked to do software projects in addition to managing our IT dept (a unix engineer, desktop support guy, and related office and production equipment)
B) My unix admin has a really hard time getting production systems up running the full code base, and we aren't getting good help from the software team. He can't run any kind of diagnostic to see where the web app is failing on the new installs. The VP of the company keeps telling me to go in and do print_r's in the code to see what is happening. This sucks!!!
First, you need to investigate Test Driven Development so that you are comfortable explaining it in terms that your developers will understand, as well as your management. Since you seem to be developing web applications, and you have technical skills, I suggest that you take the plunge and choose an open source tool for testing web applications, get it installed, and start building tests for anything that you develop yourself.
Twill is an example of the kind of testing tool that you would need.
Then, as manager, you need to entice developers to follow your example, and reward them for doing so. And punish them, when they don't use the testing framework and it leads to preventable problems. As soon as you get one such incident, you should be able to get your boss on board, and pick up some momentum.
Overall, remember that the objective is to do less work to get a good result. Cutting corners is a way of doing less work, but leads to the risk of bad, or spectacularly bad results. Keep management informed of the risk levels and potential costs at risk.
Don't just force people to do testing for testing's sake. It has to help them be more productive so choose the first projects for it carefully.
That's a good question. And if there was one correct answer to it, much more software projects would be successful and deliver high quality.
I don't think, that it is a good idea to make such a change top-down. It has to be driven from the developers themselves. So trainings in TDD direction would be good, but that is a long time invest, which takes time.
If you want a faster solution you should consider functional-, acceptance-, and systemtests. With these test you test pretty much the whole application through all layers. If you are developing web applications you should consinder using Selenium to automate your test. It is easy to create test with it (Selenium IDE).
But using only such tests (not Unit-tests) don't give you the advantages coming from TDD.
Automating your tests is crucial.
Do you have a Test or QA team?
I would first start to see if they have Test Cases that they use to qualify the build. If not you will have to develop these test cases to test the core functionality of your product.
The next step would be automating the test cases.
If the application is poorly developed without any troubleshooting tools or debugging features it would be tough until these are added as requirements for next release.
My 2 cents.
I'll have to disagree with michaelkebe- these changes need support from the executive level, in addition to a few key developers, in order to fully succeed.
Without that support, you'll just be some developers who look like they are 'wasting time on writing tests for stuff that already works.'
There needs to be a clear vision, and it needs to be repeated loudly and often.
I'm not necessarily advocating for Agile here, but often times it clicks for business owners.
If you can sell them on that, the things that you're excited about (delivering software fast, easy maintenance, automated testing, etc.) will fall into place.
Reading this post has left me wondering; are nightly builds ever better for a situation than continuous integration? The consensus of the answers seems to be pretty lopsided in favor of continuous integration, is that evangelism or is there really no reason to use nightly builds when continuous integration is an option?
If you're really doing continuous integration with all available tests, nightly builds would be redundant, since the last thing checked in that day would already have been tested.
On the other hand, if your CI regime only involves running a subset of all available tests, for example because some of your tests take a long time to run, then you can use nightlies additionally to run all tests. This'll let you catch many bugs early, and if you can't catch them early, you can at least catch them overnight.
I don't know, though, if that's technically still CI, since you're only doing a "partial" build each time, by ignoring some of the tests.
In our organization, nightly builds and CI builds have two distinct purposes. The CI build is a 'latest code' build in which the unit tests are run against the last check in as you would expect. We also run several code metrics on the CI build.
For nightly builds, however, we only incorporate source code that has been through the peer review process and is deemed ready for testing.
This way, the nightly build always contains build that is 'feature ready' for testing, while the CI build contains features that while functional (to the extent that the unit tests pass) may not be ready to send the to the test group.
The test groups writes new CRs exclusively from one of the nightly builds as opposed to the CI build, although those are also available for informal exploratory type testing.
Yes, if you have a process you want attached to a build, but it is resource heavy. For example, on my team we run JTest during the nightly build. We can't run it during the day because:
It requires a lot of resources, which may not be available
It takes 4 hours to complete each time
If you have a nice robust CI process in place a "nightly" is still useful.
As mentioned, a "nightly" build can do exhaustive tests and perhaps some high-level system tests. End-to-end stuff.
The concept of a "nightly" build is easily understood by everyone in the organization. If you have trouble communicating CI builds out to other groups (for example, a QA group that doesn't have the same handle on Agile that the Dev group might) a "nightly" is a powerful and simple concept.
If your nightly is a separate set of resources, it can be managed separately and used to cut "gold" images with some claims to software integrity. For example, developer writes code, some trusted build system that dev can't touch builds it, QA tests the gold build and signs it. In such a situation, the nightly build functions like a production build system.
Just some thoughts.
In my professional opinion, the only reason to use nightly builds is when the build process takes so long that it can't complete in a "reasonable" amount of time.
For example, if your build process takes 5 hours to complete there is really no reason to do a build on check in.
Beyond that, there is so much value in knowing as soon as possible when a build fails that it overrides other concerns.
It depends on the purpose and length of each of your builds. Basically, you should identify what you are trying to learn from CI and decide if it is worth while spending the resources on running multiple builds.
We used continuous integration at my last job for a few different purposes.
First, we used it to make sure that the repository and thus the developers always had a version of the code that compiled. Few things are worse for team members than having to manage another person's broken changes through commenting, uncommenting, reverting and merging, because one person checked in bad code. For this, we had a build that ran instantaneously with no tests or other validation so we knew as soon as possible if the code was safe to update. Builds usually took about ten minutes and the machine was probably running around 50% on a normal workday. No documentation was generated here, just a quiet pass or a loud fail siren.
Second, we wanted to know as soon as possible whether or not any rules were broken. The quicker that you find a broken rule, the easier it is to fix. For this purpose, we had a separate machine that ran a full build and validation of the code. This machine was running 12-14 hours a day continuously on a normal workday. Email status of the build was sent out describing broken unit tests, code compliance, etc.
We stopped there as far as automatically triggered builds go. A nightly build on top of that seemed a bit extreme for us. But I suppose if you wanted to have a snapshot build archived daily, you may want to schedule a third build with the extra steps required for that. Though, we did have another build that wrapped up and archived our QA deployment artifacts for quick and easy deployment, but we only ever manually triggered that one.
I think the other posts cover the common reasons, like having a build process that takes "too long" or having to run only a subset of tests during the CI build. But there's another reason which is political.
In some organizations the official builds are handled by a minimally responsive build/infrastructure/release management/SCM team. In these cases you might put them in charge of the nightly build and then run the CI build out of development. This avoids a fight because their build remains "the official build" and your CI build give you the feedback you need.
We have both continuous integration and nightly builds in place. They serve two different purposes.
Our continuous integration mechanism builds the software and runs unit tests under the continuous integration suite.
Our nightly build tags the source under version control, builds the software, runs the unit tests under nightly build suite. The software built here is then used in various system tests and stress tests.
I think that one of the main differentiator for nightly build is system tests.
What constitutes a good CI build-process?
We use CI, but is deployment to production even a realistic CI goal when you have dependencies on several services that should be deployed too and other apps may depend on these too.
Is a good good CI build process good enough when its automated to QA and manual from there?
Well "it depends" :)
We use our CI system to:
build & unit test
deploy to single box, run intergration tests and code analisys
deploy to lab environment
run acceptance tests in prod-like system
drop builds that pass to code drop for prod deployment
This is for a greenfield project of about a dozen services and databases deployed to 20+ servers, that also had dependencies on half a dozen other 'external' services.
Using a CI tool to deploy your product to a production environment as a realistic goal? again... "it depends"
Why would you want to do this?
if you have the process you can roll changes (and roll back) faster and more often
less chance for human error
you can test the same deployment strategy in a test environment before going to production and catch issues earlier
Some technical things you have to address before you can answer this:
what is the uptime requirements for your system -- Are you allowed to have downtime or does it need to be up 24/7?
do you have change control processes in place that require human intervention/approval?
is your deployment robust enough for any component to roll back to a known-good state if a deployment fails?
is your system designed to handle different versions of services or clients in case one or several component deployments fails (and you have the above rollback to last known good)?
does the process have the smarts to handle a partial deployment where a component cannot handle mixed versions of its dependencies/clients?
how are you handing database deployment/upgrades?
do you have monitoring in place so you know when something goes wrong?
Here are a couple of recent related links about automation and building the tools you need.
When it comes down to it the more complex your system the more difficult it is do automate everything, but that does not mean it is not a worthy goal, it just takes a lot more effort and willpower to get it done -- everything from knowing the difficulties you're going to face, the problems you have to account for (failure will happen), the political challenges of building infrastructure (vs. more product features).
Now heres the big secret... the technical challenges are challenging but not impossible... the political challenges may be insurmountable. Everything about this costs money whether its dev time or buying 3rd party solutions. So really, can you build the $1K, $10K, $100K, or $1M solution?
Whatever solution you go for make sure the automation is robust first, complete second... i.e. make sure you have as robust a solution as you can for getting deployment to a test environment rather than a fragile solution that deploys to production.
CI is not intended as a deployment mechanism. It is good to have your CI execute any automated deployment to a QA/Test server, to ensure those aspects of your build work, but I would not use a CI system like Cruise Control or Bamboo as the means of deployment.
CI is for building the codebase periodically to automate execution of automated tests, verification of the codebase via static analysis and other checks of that nature.
Be sure you understand the idea behind a CI build. CI stands for Continuous Integration and CI builds are really intended to be throw-away builds that are performed when a developer checks code in to the source control system (or at some specified interval) to ensure that the newest changes do not break the code base (hence the idea of continuously integrating the changes to the code base).
To that end, the technology used for the actual build server process is largely irrelevant compared to what actually happens during the build. As #pdavis mentioned, the CI build should compile the code base, execute some code analysis (FxCop, StyleCop, Lint, etc.), execute unit tests and code coverage, and execute any other custom analysis you want performed that should impact the concept of a "successful" or "failed" build.
Having a CI build automatically deploy to an environment really doesn't fall under the control of a build server. That being said, you can always create a separate project that runs on the build server that handles the deployment when it detects certain conditions (such as a build completes successfuly), but that should always be done as a completely independent thing.
I am starting on a new project at work that I am really looking forward to. We are still in the initial design stage and have just recently completed the Logical System Architecture. We have ordered new servers for the testing and staging environments and are setting up a Continuous Integration (CI) build system based on Cruise Control (http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/) and MSBuild (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wea2sca5.aspx) which is basically an improved port of ANT. It appears that Visual Studio 2005 project and solution files are all now in MSBuild format. Cruise Control will be automatically pulling the source from Visual Source Safe (ok, it isn't Subversion but we can deal), compiling it, and then running it through fxCop (http://www.gotdotnet.com/Team/FxCop/), nUnit (http://www.nunit.org/), nCover (http://ncover.org/site/), and last but not lease Simian (http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/products/simian/). Cruise Control has a pretty good website interface for displaying all of the compiled results from the various tools and can even display code changes from one build to the next. It also keeps track of all builds in a build history. I'm looking forward to the test driven development and think that this type of approach combined with nUnit/nCover should give us a pretty good idea before we roll out changes that we haven't broken anything. There are also plans to incorporate some type of automated user interface testing once we are far enough along in the project. Depending on the tool, this should be just a matter of installing the tool on the build server and calling it from Cruise Control. Sweet.
A good CI process will have full or nearly-full unit test coverage. Unit tests test classes and methods, vs. integration tests, which test multiple parts of the system. When you set up your CI builds, have them automate the unit tests. That way, the CI builds can run multiple times per day. We have ours set to run every 2 hours.
You can have longer running builds that run once per day. These can use other services and run integration tests.
I was watching a ThoughtWorks presentation (creators of Cruise Control) and they actually addressed this issue. Their answer is that NO deployment is too complex to test. Why? Because otherwise, your customers become your testers, which is exactly where you don't want to be.
If you have a complex deployment structure, set up a visualization server. Have it pretend to be all the systems you need to talk to. They can always start in a known good state, because you can reset to a clean image.
To answer your initial question, a good process is one which enables communication between the repository and the developers. If the repository is in a bad state (non-compiling code, failed tests, etc.), the developers know about it as soon as possible, so that they can correct it.
The later a bug is discovered, the costlier it is to fix. So bugs should be discovered as early as possible. This is the motivation behind CI.
A good CI should ensure catching as many bugs as possible. The whole application comprises of code (often in multiple languages), Database schema, deployment files etc. Errors in any of these can cause bugs - so the CI should try to exercise as many of them as possible.
CI does not replace a proper QA discipline. Also, CI need not be very comprehensive on day one of the project. One can start with a simple CI process that does basic compilation & unit testing initially. As you discover more classes of bugs in QA, you should adapt the CI process to try to catch future occurrences of those bugs. It can also involve static code-analysis checks, so that you can implement consistent coding and design ideals across the codebase.