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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 significant reduction in the number of tests 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 official EWS . 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 or methods 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 with patches describing the method can be found here: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78699
Test selection in Selective Regression Testing consists of the following main steps:
- A list of changed methods is determined using a modified version of the PrepareChangeLog script. This script originally helps the developers to find the locally modified functions when they make their svn comments before an svn commit, and is a simple approximate textual parser. The modified version of this scripts produces a list of changed procedures in a format that is appropriate for the other scripts in the toolchain.
- When the list is ready, a database query is executed to get those test cases which cover the changed methods.
- The result of the query is the list of test cases to be executed, and this list is transferred to the test execution script present in the buildbot which has also been modified to accept this feature.
Some results
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