[This is cross-posted to the public intel-gfx mailing list at
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/intel-gfx/2013-October/035268.html
I'll also present a quick overview of this at Gavin's kernel PDT next week.]
Hi all,
So in the past half year we've had tons of sometimes rather heated
discussions
about getting patches merged. Often these discussions have been in the
context
of specific patch series, which meant that people are already invested.
Which
contributed to the boiling emotions. I'd like to avoid that here by
making this
a free-standing discussion.
There's a bunch of smaller process tuning going on, but the big thing
I'd like
to instate henceforth is that automated test coverage is a primary
consideration
for anything going upstream. In this write up I'll detail my reasons,
considerations and expectations. My plan is to solicit feedback over the
next
few days and then publish an edited and polished version to my blog.
After that I'll put down my foot on this process so that we can go back to
coding and stop blowing through so much time and energy on waging flamewars.
Feedback and critique highly welcome.
Cheers, Daniel
Testing Requirements for Upstreaming (Draft)
============================================
I want to make automated test coverage an integral part of our feature
and bufix
development process. For features this means that starting with the
design phase
testability needs to be considered an integral part of any feature. This
needs
to go up through the entire development process until when the
implementation is
submitted together with the proposed tests. For bugfixes that means the
fix is
only complete once the automated testcase for it is also done, if we
need a new
one.
This specifically excludes testing with humans somewhere in the loop. We are
extremely limited in our validation resources, every time we put
something new
onto the "manual testing" plate something else _will_ fall off.
Why?
----
- More predictability. Right now test coverage often only comes up as a
topic
when I drop my maintainer review onto a patch series. Which is too
late, since
it'll delay the otherwise working patches and so massively frustrates
people.
I hope by making test requirements clear and up-front we can make the
upstreaming process more predictable. Also, if we have good tests
from the get-go
there should be much less need for me to drop patches from my trees
after having them merged.
- Less bikeshedding. In my opinion test cases are an excellent means to
settle
bikesheds - we've had in the past seen cases of endless back&forths
where writing a simple testcase would have shown that _all_ proposed
color flavours are actually broken.
The even more important thing is that fully automated tests allow us to
legitimately postpone cleanups. If the only testing we have is manual
testing
then we have only one shot at a feature tested, namely when the developer
tests it. So it better be perfect. But with automated tests we can
postpone
cleanups with too high risks of regressions until a really clear need is
established. And since that need often never materializes we'll save
work.
- Better review. For me it's often helps a lot to review tests than the
actual
code in-depth. This is especially true for reviewing userspace interface
additions.
- Actionable regression reports. Only if we have a fully automated
testcase do
we have a good chance that QA reports a regression within just a few
days.
Everything else can easily take weeks (for platforms and features
which are
explicitly tested) to months (for stuff only users from the community
notice).
And especially now that much more shipping products depend upon a working
i915.ko driver we just can't do this any more.
- Better tests. A lot of our code is really hard to test in an automated
fashion, and pushing the frontier of what is testable often requires
a lot of
work. I hope that by making tests an integral part of any feature
work and so
forcing more people to work on them and think about testing we'll
advance the state of the art at a brisker pace.
Risks and Buts
--------------
- Bikeshedding on tests. This plan is obviously not too useful if we just
replace massive bikeshedding on patches with massive bikeshedding on
testcases. But right now we do almost no review on i-g-t patches so
the risk
is small. Long-term the review requirements for testcases will certainly
increase, but as with everything else we simply need to strive for a good
balance to strike for just the right amount of review.
Also if we really start discussing tests _before_ having written
massive patch
series we'll do the bikeshedding while there's no real rebase pain.
So even if
the bikeshedding just shifts we'll benefit I think, especially for
really big features.
- Technical debt in test coverage. We have a lot of old code which still
completely lacks testcases. Which means that even small feature work
might be
on the hook for a big pile of debt restructuring. I think this is
inevitable
occasionally. But I think that doing an assement of the current state of
test coverage of the existing code _before_ starting a feature instead
of when the patches are ready for merging should help a lot, before
everyone is invested into patches already and mounting rebase pain looms
large.
Again we need to strive for a good balance between "too many tests to
write
up-front for old code" and "needs for tests that only the final review
uncovers creating process bubbles".
- Upstreaming of product stuff. Product guys are notoriuosly busy and
writing
tests is actual work. Otoh the upstream codebase feeds back into
_all_ product
trees (and the upstream kernel), so requirements are simply a bit
higher. And
I also don't think that we can push the testing of some features fully to
product teams, since they'll be pissed really quickly if every update
they get
from us breaks their stuff. So if these additional test requirements
(compared
to the past) means that some product patches won't get merged, then I
think
that's the right choice.
- But ... all the other kernel drivers don't do this. We're also one of the
biggest driver's in the kernel, with a code churn rate roughly 5x
worse than
anything else and a pretty big (and growing) team. Also, we're often the
critical path in enabling new platforms in the fast-paced mobile space.
Different standards apply.
Expectations
------------
Since the point here is to make the actual test requirements known
up-front we
need to settle on clear expectations. Since this is the part that actually
matters in practice I'll really welcome close scrutiny and comments here.
- Tests must fully cover userspace interfaces. By this I mean exercising
all the
possible options, especially the usual tricky corner cases (e.g.
off-by-one
array sizes, overflows). It also needs to include tests for all the
userspace input validation (i.e. correctly rejecting invalid input,
including checks for the error codes). For userspace interface additions
technical debt really must be addressed. This means that when adding a
new flag and we currently don't have any tests for those flags, then
I'll ask for a testcase which fully exercises all the flag values we
currently support on top of the new interface addition.
- Tests need to provide a reasonable baseline coverage of the internal
driver
state. The idea here isn't to aim for full coverage, that's an
impossible and
pointless endeavor. The goal is to have a good starting point of
tests so that
when a tricky corner case pops up in review or validation that it's not a
terribly big effort to add a specific testcase for it.
- Issues discovered in review and final validation need automated test
coverage.
The reasoning is that anything which slipped the developer's attention is
tricky enough to warrant an explicit testcase, since in a later
refactoring
there's a good chance that it'll be missed again. This has a bit a risk
to delay patches, but if the basic test coverage is good enough as per
the previous point it really shouln't be an issue.
- Finally we need to push the testable frontier with new ideas like pipe
CRCs,
modeset state cross checking or arbitrary monitor configuration injection
(with fixed EDIDs and connector state forcing). The point here is to
forster
new crazy ideas, and the expectation is very much _not_ that
developers then
need to write testcases for all the old bugfixes that suddenly became
testable. That workload needs to be spread out over a bunch of features
touching the relevant area. This only really applies to features and
code paths which are currently in the "not testable" bucket anyway.
This should specify the "what" decently enough, but we also need to look
at how
tests should work.
Specific testcases in i-g-t are obviously the preferred form, but for some
features that's just not possible. In such cases in-kernel self-checks like
the modeset state checker of fifo underrun reporting are really good
approaches. Two ceaveats apply:
- The test infrastructure really should be orthogonal to the code being
tested.
In-line asserts that check for preconditions are really nice and
useful, but
since they're closely tied to the code itself have a good chance to
be broken
in the same ways.
- The debug feature needs to be enabled by default, and it needs to be loud.
Otherwise no one will notice that something is amiss. So currently
the fifo
underrun reporting doesn't really count since it only causes debug level
output when something goes wrong. Of course it's still a really good
tool for
developers, just not yet for catching regressions.
Finally the short lists of excuses that don't count as proper test
coverage for
a feature.
- Manual testing. We are ridiculously limited on our QA manpower. Every
time we
drop something onto the "manual testing" plate something else _will_
drop off.
Which means in the end that we don't really have any test coverage. So
if patches don't come with automated tests, in-kernel cross-checking or
some other form of validation attached they need to have really good
reasons for doing so.
- Testing by product teams. The entire point of Intel OTC's "upstream first"
strategy is to have a common codebase for everyone. If we break
product trees
every time we feed an update into them because we can't properly
regression
test a given feature then the value of upstreaming features is greatly
diminished in my opinion and could potentially doom collaborations with
product teams. We just can't have that.
This means that when products teams submit patches upstream they also
need
to submit the relevant testcases to i-g-t.
Intel Semiconductor AG
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