Testing Tacker
==============

Overview
--------

The unit tests are meant to cover as much code as possible and should
be executed without the service running. They are designed to test
the various pieces of the tacker tree to make sure any new changes
don't break existing functionality.

The functional tests are intended to validate actual system
interaction.  Mocks should be used sparingly, if at all.  Care
should be taken to ensure that existing system resources are not
modified and that resources created in tests are properly cleaned
up.

Development process
-------------------

It is expected that any new changes that are proposed for merge
come with tests for that feature or code area. Ideally any bugs
fixes that are submitted also have tests to prove that they stay
fixed!  In addition, before proposing for merge, all of the
current tests should be passing.

Running unit tests
------------------

There are two mechanisms for running tests: tox and nose. Before
submitting a patch for review you should always ensure all test pass;
a tox run is triggered by the jenkins gate executed on gerrit for
each patch pushed for review.

With these mechanisms you can either run the tests in the standard
environment or create a virtual environment to run them in.

By default after running all of the tests, any pep8 errors
found in the tree will be reported.


With `nose`
~~~~~~~~~~~

You can use `nose`_ to run individual tests, as well as use for debugging
portions of your code::

    source .venv/bin/activate
    pip install nose
    nosetests

There are disadvantages to running Nose - the tests are run sequentially, so
race condition bugs will not be triggered, and the full test suite will
take significantly longer than tox & testr. The upside is that testr has
some rough edges when it comes to diagnosing errors and failures, and there is
no easy way to set a breakpoint in the Tacker code, and enter an
interactive debugging session while using testr.

.. _nose: https://nose.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

With `tox`
~~~~~~~~~~

Tacker, like other OpenStack projects, uses `tox`_ for managing the virtual
environments for running test cases. It uses `Testr`_ for managing the running
of the test cases.

Tox handles the creation of a series of `virtualenvs`_ that target specific
versions of Python (2.7, 3.4, etc).

Testr handles the parallel execution of series of test cases as well as
the tracking of long-running tests and other things.

Running unit tests is as easy as executing this in the root directory of the
Tacker source code::

    tox

For more information on the standard Tox-based test infrastructure used by
OpenStack and how to do some common test/debugging procedures with Testr,
see this wiki page:

  https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Testr

.. _Testr: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Testr
.. _tox: http://tox.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
.. _virtualenvs: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv


Running individual tests
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For running individual test modules or cases, you just need to pass
the dot-separated path to the module you want as an argument to it.

For executing a specific test case, specify the name of the test case
class separating it from the module path with a colon.

For example, the following would run only the TestVNFMPlugin tests from
tacker/tests/unit/vm/test_plugin.py::

      $ ./tox tacker.tests.unit.vm.test_plugin:TestVNFMPlugin

Debugging
---------

It's possible to debug tests in a tox environment::

    $ tox -e venv -- python -m testtools.run [test module path]

Tox-created virtual environments (venv's) can also be activated
after a tox run and reused for debugging::

    $ tox -e venv
    $ . .tox/venv/bin/activate
    $ python -m testtools.run [test module path]

Tox packages and installs the tacker source tree in a given venv
on every invocation, but if modifications need to be made between
invocation (e.g. adding more pdb statements), it is recommended
that the source tree be installed in the venv in editable mode::

    # run this only after activating the venv
    $ pip install --editable .

Editable mode ensures that changes made to the source tree are
automatically reflected in the venv, and that such changes are not
overwritten during the next tox run.