wiki:SelectiveTestBuildBot

Version 3 (modified by beszedes@inf.u-szeged.hu, 12 years ago) (diff)

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Selective Regression Testing

Goal and motivation

The purpose of this project is to create and maintain a test system that executes Layout Tests based on code changes, that is, only those tests are selected for execution (automatically) that are affected by the changes made to the source code. The method can be used either in a build bot or as part of an Early Warning System (see SelectiveTestEWS).

The selection is made based on function level code coverage which means that only those tests are selected for a revision x which traverse any of the functions changed at x, all other tests are skipped. Based on an experiments performed on WebKit revisions from October 2011, on average less than 0.1% of the test cases were failing while on average 5 functions were changed per revision in this period. Moreover, the number of test cases affected by a specific change was usually very low. The coverage of all the tests was altogether about 70-75% of the total number of functions but if we perform the tests selectively we can still achieve the same coverage with respect to the changes but by executing only a fraction of all the tests.

In the same experiment, we got a high percentage of inclusiveness: over 95% of the failing test cases in the full test could be identified by using the function change coverage method, and at the same time a siginficant reduction in the number of test performed was achieved. Namely, we got this result by executing less than 1% of the test cases on average.

Usage

There will be two types of use of the selective regression tests:

  • As a special build bot (currently for the Qt port which started in November 2011). This provides a faster alternative to the build bot performing full test: it saves more than 77% of the total build time including the overhead required for the selection. Probably embedded platforms like ARM could benefit most of this method. The Qt build bot can be found here: http://build.webkit.sed.hu/builders/x86-64%20Linux%20Qt%20Release%20QuickTest
  • As part of the Chromium Early Warning System. This will allow developers and reviewers to check the patches in Bugzilla before landing in the repository. Due to the selection the time required to perform the tests will be much less. Detailed description is at SelectiveTestEWS.

Technicalities and how to get it

The method for test selection is the following. We instrument the source code of the methods and functions to log entry and exit events during execution, and make such an instrumented build of the system (using the GCC instrumentation feature and our custom C++ instrumentation code). Then all tests are executed to produce the initial coverage information, which relates each test to a set of functions it executes. This information is stored in a relational database. Next, a set of changed functions is extracted from a revision under test (using an extended PrepareChangeLog script) and this set is used to query the database for a list of tests to execute.

The meta-bug describing the method can be found here: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78699

The preliminary patch is (will be) here.

Some results

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