Re: Testing and infrastructure management for large Clojure app - how are you doing it?
Thanks Colin I probably should've added that this is a large enterprise doing what's essentially an in-house startup - building an app using Clojure. The app initially sat somewhat off to the side of the corporation's main line of business, but there was always the intent to incorporate the new app into the existing core infrastructure at some future date. It was left open as to how that would actually happen, and now we're having to confront that problem directly. While we have something of a startup mentality within the project with respect to what gets done day to day and how it gets done, there's an overarching set of tools/processes/requirements/constraints that come hand in hand with working for a large enterprise. One of those is that we've got an existing pool of testers already within the enterprise, and need to find some alignment between their existing tools/capabilities/processes/... and the requirements of our new shiny Clojure app. We've got testers who've been on the project virtually since it began (who've NOT used Clojure but instead have focused on testing interfaces using SoapUI and the web client) but now the project has grown to the point where we need both (a) more testers just to keep pace with development, (b) testers with different backgrounds (mobile being the big one) and (c) the testers need to come from the existing enterprise pool. I'm sure we COULD cross train at least some of these testers to do their work within Clojure, but there's currently zero long-term tangible benefit for either their career path or the enterprise in doing so. If the enterprise had a pool of upcoming Clojure projects, then it would probably be a different story. Absolutely agree that there's a lot of time and expense in testing that's not always focused appropriately, and that's ultimately what I'm trying to fix/avoid in this project. Personally, I wish we'd all stop using the phrase testing and instead use risk mitigation to try to keep the desired outcome of the activity clear in everyone's mind at key decision points, but this isn't the forum for THAT discussion ;- Thanks again for your response Dave M. On Wednesday, 29 October 2014 20:07:34 UTC+11, Colin Yates wrote: I also meant to say that it is worth doing a cost-benefit analysis on testing. When I did my consultant thing I frequently saw massive investment in tools, process, emotion(!) etc. in things that on paper were a good thing but in reality weren't mitigating any real risk. All testing isn't equal - what risks do you currently face right now (e.g. are you playing whack-a-moley due to developer's poor impact analysis, or for example, are the developers consistently producing great code which doesn't piece together well and so on)? Put your energies into resolving those risks. Most testing processes and resources I see are by definition re-active - they find effects (bugs) of the cause (which is typically developer insufficiency in terms of requirements). In my view resources should all be about mitigating the cause. Why not get your testers (although I really don't like segmenting resources by calling them testers) to sit with a developer just before they do a new piece of work and think through the impact analysis? Have your testers take the use cases and start building the test scenarios immediately. Have your testers review the developers unit tests - if it doesn't make sense to a (technically orientated) tester than the developer is probably doing it wrong and so on. Simply spotting effects is helpful but all resources should be focused on mitigating the cause of those effects and more often than not I see a whole bunch of testing activity which isn't really solving any real problems but is certainly slowing down the flow. Please let me clear - I am not challenging the _requirements_ of the traditional testing process (e.g. ensuring quality), I am claiming the way most people do it is incredibly expensive and inefficient. I can hear the internet taking a breath saying No!, he didn't just go there :). On Wednesday, 29 October 2014 00:12:52 UTC, David Mitchell wrote: Hi Colin Thanks for your reply. My post is almost exclusively technology oriented because I think the technology is what's killing us! We've got what you'd probably call BDD lite working, in that we've got a mutant form of agile process running whereby we work in 2 week sprints, but there's rarely an installable product that emerges at the end of the 2 weeks. I won't go into detail as to what I feel are the root causes in a public forum - however I'm convinced that our adoption of Clojure is at least partly to blame. Just to make it clear, I absolutely believe Clojure is a good tool to use for this project, and personally I'll be actively seeking out other Clojure projects in the future. I'm saying that from the viewpoint of someone who's
Re: Testing and infrastructure management for large Clojure app - how are you doing it?
and inefficient. I can hear the internet taking a breath saying No!, he didn't just go there :). On Wednesday, 29 October 2014 00:12:52 UTC, David Mitchell wrote: Hi Colin Thanks for your reply. My post is almost exclusively technology oriented because I think the technology is what's killing us! We've got what you'd probably call BDD lite working, in that we've got a mutant form of agile process running whereby we work in 2 week sprints, but there's rarely an installable product that emerges at the end of the 2 weeks. I won't go into detail as to what I feel are the root causes in a public forum - however I'm convinced that our adoption of Clojure is at least partly to blame. Just to make it clear, I absolutely believe Clojure is a good tool to use for this project, and personally I'll be actively seeking out other Clojure projects in the future. I'm saying that from the viewpoint of someone who's employed in the testing area, but who also has quite a bit of Clojure development experience. There's just this gulf at present between the people who know Clojure (almost exclusively developers) and other technical staff involved in the application lifecycle (testers, infrastructure owners, all the various technical managers) that we're finding very difficult to manage. For example, it'd be great if we could pair up our testers and developers, have them working side by side and rapidly iterating through e.g. Cucumber feature definition, coding and testing. That would be absolutely ideal for this particular project, where a complete set of test cases can't be 100% defined up front and lots of minor questions arise even within an iteration. If this working arrangement was viable, every time we hit a point that needed clarification, the tester could engage the product owner, get clarification and jump back in to their normal work with minimal disruption. However, our testers simply can't provide enough useful input into development - they're currently stuck waiting for developers to hand their code over *in a form that the testers can test it*, and often there's a lot of extra (wasted?) effort involved to take working Clojure code and make it testable using non-Clojure tools. To say this is an inefficient working model would be a massive understatement. What we're seeing is that our developers work like mad for the first week of a 2 week iteration, while the testers are largely idle; then code gets handed over and the developers are largely idle while the testers work like mad trying to finish their work before the end of the iteration. Our automation testers are valiantly trying to use SoapUI and Groovy and (to a small extent) Cucumber/Ruby to test our Clojure code, but those tools require that there are exposed HTTP endpoints (SoapUI) or Java classes (Groovy or *JRuby*) that the tool can use to exercise the underlying Clojure code. These endpoints exist, but only at a very high level - our UI testing, which works very well, is already hitting those same endpoints. Additionally, our QA manager wants our testers to be able to do more exploratory testing, based on his personal experience of using Ruby's interactive shell, and simply trying stuff out. That approach makes a lot of sense for this project, and I know that using a Clojure REPL could provide a great platform for this type of testing, but doing that would require a sizeable investment in our testers learning to use Clojure. I'm starting to wonder whether there's actually any point trying to do *any* system testing of Clojure apps under active development, as maybe that risk exposure can best be addressed by enforcing suitable coding standards (e.g. :pre and :post conditions), and then extending what would normally be unit tests to address whole-of-system functionality. After all, for an app written in a functional language - where you've basically only got functions that take parameters and return a result, minimal state to manage, and usually a small set of functions having side effects like database IO - surely a lot of your traditional functional test scenarios would simply be tightly-targetted unit tests anyway. Maybe we should be handing off our single-system functional testing entirely to developers, and only engaging our dedicated QA people once we get to integrating all the different streams of development together. That seems to be the approach that Craig's project (thanks Craig!) is taking, and it'd definitely be easier to work with compared to our current processes. Due to the lack of oversight and up-front objective requirements, there could be an increased risk that our developers are writing code to solve the wrong problem, but maybe that's just something we need to live with. If anyone else has any thoughts, I'd REALLY appreciate hearing about them. Thanks again to Colin and Craig On Tuesday
Re: Testing and infrastructure management for large Clojure app - how are you doing it?
in http://specificationbyexample.com/. If you haven't, I strongly recommend you do as the win in this situation is they separate the required behaviour of the system (i.e. the specification) being tested from the technical geekery of asserting that behaviour. In brief, this process, when done well: - defines behaviour in readable text documents (albeit restricted by the jerkin grammar) - the same specification is consumed by the stake holders and the computer (and if you want bonus points are produced by/with the stake holders :)) - provides access to many libraries to interpret and execute those specs ( http://cukes.info/ being the main one etc.) Once you get into the whole vibe of freeing your specs from implementation a whole new world opens up. http://fitnesse.org/ for example, is another approach. I am suggesting the tension in your post around how do we collate all our resources around an unfamiliar tool might be best addressed by using a new tool - the shared artifacts are readable English textual specifications which everybody collaborates on. The geeks do their thing (using Ruby, Clojure, groovy, Scala, Selenium, A.N.Other etc.) to execute those same specs. On Monday, 27 October 2014 04:21:07 UTC, David Mitchell wrote: Hi group, Apologies for the somewhat cryptic subject line - I'll try to explain... Apologies also for the length of the post, but I'm sure others will hit the same problem if they haven't already done so, and hopefully this discussion will help them find a way out of a sticky situation. We've got a (notionally agile) Clojure app under heavy development. The project itself follows the Agile Manifesto to a degree, but is constrained in having to interface with other applications that are following a waterfall process. Yep, it's awkward, but that's not what I'm asking about. Simplifying it as much as possible, we started with a pre-existing, somewhat clunky, Java app, then extended the server side extensively using Clojure, and added a web client. There's loads of (non-Clojure) supporting infrastructure - database cluster, queue servers, identity management, etc. At any point, we've got multiple streams of Clojure development going on, hitting different parts of the app. The web client development is traditional in that it's not using ClojureScript, and probably won't in the foreseeable future. As mentioned above, a key point is that the app has a significant requirement to interface to legacy systems - other Java apps, SAP, Oracle identity management stack and so on. From a testing perspective, for this app we've got unit tests written in Clojure/midje which are maintained by the app developers (as you'd expect). These work well and midje is a good fit for the app. However, given all the various infrastructure requirements of the app, it's hard to see how we can use midje to go all the way up the testing stack (unit - system - integration - pre-production - production). From the web client perspective, we've got UI automation tests written using Ruby/Capybara, a toolset which I suspect was chosen based on the existing skillset of the pool of testers. Again this works well for us. The problem is with the middle ground between the two extremes of unit and UI testing - our glaring problem at present is with integration testing, but there's also a smaller problem with system testing. We're struggling to find an approach that works here, given the skillsets we have on hand - fundamentally, we've got a (small) pool of developers who know Clojure, a (small) pool of testers who know Ruby, and a larger pool of testers who do primarily non-automated testing. In an ideal world, we'd probably use Clojure for all automated testing. It seems relatively straightforward to use Stuart Sierra's component library (https://github.com/stuartsierra/component) to mock out infrastructure components such as databases, queues, email servers etc., and doing so would let us address our system-level testing. On the integration front, we could conceivably also leverage the same component library to manage the state of all the various infrastructure components that the app depends on, and thus ensure that we had a suitably production-like environment for integration testing. This would be a non-trivial piece of work. Our big problem really boils down to just not having enough skilled Clojure people available to the project. You could point to any of the following areas that are probably common to any non-trivial Clojure application: either we don't have enough Clojure developers to address the various requirements of system and integration testing, or our techops guys don't have the necessary skills to expose a Clojure/component interface to the various test/development environments, or our testers don't know Clojure and not willing to take the word
