What motivated this change?
Our builds on Github actions have been extremely flaky mostly due to system tests. This has led to a drop in confidence
in our test suite where our developers tend to assume that a failed job is due to a flaky system test. As a result, we
have had occurrences where changes that resulted in legitimate test failures are merged into the `main` branch because developers
assumed it was a flaky test.
What does this change do?
This change seeks to reduce the flakiness of our builds on Github Actions by automatically re-running RSpec tests once when
they fail. If a failed test passes subsequently in the re-run, we mark the test as flaky by logging it into a file on disk
which is then uploaded as an artifact of the Github workflow run. We understand that automatically re-runs will lead to
lower accuracy of our tests but we accept this as an acceptable trade-off since a fragile build has a much greater impact
on our developers' time. Internally, the Discourse development team will be running a service to fetch the flaky tests
which have been logged for internal monitoring.
How is the change implemented?
1. A `--retry-and-log-flaky-tests` CLI flag is added to the `bin/turbo_rspec` CLI which will then initialize `TurboTests::Runner`
with the `retry_and_log_flaky_tests` kwarg set to `true`.
2. When the `retry_and_log_flaky_tests` kwarg is set to `true` for `TurboTests::Runner`, we will register an additional
formatter `Flaky::FailuresLoggerFormatter` to the `TurboTests::Reporter` in the `TurboTests::Runner#run` method.
The `Flaky::FailuresLoggerFormatter` has a simple job of logging all failed examples to a file on disk when running all the
tests. The details of the failed example which are logged can be found in `TurboTests::Flaky::FailedExample.to_h`.
3. Once all the tests have been run once, we check the result for any failed examples and if there are, we read the file on
disk to fetch the `location_rerun_location` of the failed examples which is then used to run the tests in a new RSpec process.
In the rerun, we configure a `TurboTests::Flaky::FlakyDetectorFormatter` with RSpec which removes all failed examples from the log file on disk since those examples are not flaky tests. Note that if there are too many failed examples on the first run, we will deem the failures to likely not be due to flaky tests and not re-run the test failures. As of writing, the threshold of failed examples is set to 10. If there are more than 10 failed examples, we will not re-run the failures.
Why this change?
The process's pid is useful when we're trying to link output from
different processes together. In this case, we want to be able to link
the Rails server logs to the right rspec process.
Before:
[2] Viewing sidebar mobile collapses the sidebar when clicking outside of it
After:
[2] (#176342) Viewing sidebar mobile collapses the sidebar when clicking outside of it
Why is this change required?
By default, `RSpec` comes with a `--profile=[COUNT]` option as well but
enabling that option means that the entire test suite needs to be
executed. This does not work so well for `turbo_rspec` which splits our
test files into various "buckets" for the tests to be executed in
multiple processes. Therefore, this commit adds a similar
`--profile=[COUNT]` option to `turbo_rspec` but will only profile the
tests being executed. Examples:
`LOAD_PLUGINS=1 bin/turbo_rspec --profile plugins/*/spec/system`
or
`LOAD_PLUGINS=1 bin/turbo_rspec --profile=20 plugins/*/spec/system`
* Color for turbo_rspec in CI (`progress` and `documentation` formats)
* Show "DONE" only when `documentation` formatter is used
* Fix formatting
* Collapse RSpec commands
* Add line wrapping to the `progress` formatter (to mitigate GH Actions issue)
Previously, browser logs would be printed to STDOUT halfway through the test run. This commit changes the behaviour so that the logs are included in the failure summary along with other rspec failure information.
* DEV: Add a new way to run specs in parallel with better output
This commit:
1. adds a new executable, `bin/interleaved_rspec` which works much like
`rspec`, but runs the tests in parallel.
2. adds a rake task, `rake interleaved:spec` which runs the whole test
suite.
3. makes autospec use this new wrapper by default. You can disable this
by running `PARALLEL_SPEC=0 rake autospec`.
It works much like the `parallel_tests` gem (and relies on it), but
makes each subprocess use a machine-readable formatter and parses this
output in order to provide a better overall summary.
(It's called interleaved, because parallel was taken and naming is
hard).
* Make popen3 invocation safer
* Use FileUtils instead of shelling out
* DRY up reporter
* Moved summary logic into Reporter
* s/interleaved/turbo/g
* Move Reporter into its own file
* Moved run into its own class
* Moved Runner into its own file
* Move JsonRowsFormatter under TurboTests
* Join on threads at the end
* Acted on feedback from eviltrout
Alan Guo Xiang Tan
Jarek Radosz
David Taylor
Daniel Waterworth
Sam Saffron