Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Usability improvements for Firefox automation initiative - Status update #1

The developer survey conducted by Engineering Productivity last fall indicated that debugging test failures that are reported by automation is a significant frustration for many developers. In fact, it was the biggest deficit identified by the survey. As a result,
the Engineering Productivity Team (aka A-Team) is working on improving the user experience for debugging test failures in our continuous integration and speeding up the turnaround for Try server jobs.

This quarter’s main focus is on:
  • Debugging tests on interactive workers (only Linux on TaskCluster)
  • Improve end to end times on Try (Thunder Try project)

For all bugs and priorities you can check out the project management page for it:

In this email you will find the progress we’ve made recently. In future updates you will see a delta from this email.

PS = These status updates will be fortnightly


Debugging tests on interactive workers
Accomplished recently:
  • Landed support for running reftest and xpcshell via tests.zip
  • Many UX improvements to the interactive loaner workflow

Upcoming:
  • Make sure Xvfb is running so you can actually run the tests!
  • Mochitest support + all other harnesses


Thunder Try - Improve end to end times on try

Project #1 - Artifact builds on automation

Accomplished recently:
  • Landed prerequisites for Windows and OS X artifact builds on try.
  • Identified which tests should be skipped with artifact builds

Upcoming:
  • Provide a try syntax flag to trigger only artifact builds instead of full builds; starting with opt Linux 64.


Project #2 - S3 Cloud Compiler Cache

Accomplished recently:
  • Sccache’s Rust re-write has reached feature parity with Python’s sccache
  • Now testing sccache2 on Try

Upcoming:
  • We want to roll out a two-tier sccache for Try, which will enable it to benefit from cache objects from integration branches


Project #3 - Metrics

Accomplished recently:

Upcoming:
  • Putting Mozharness steps’ data inside Treeherder’s database for aggregate analysis

Other
Upcoming:
  • TaskCluster Linux builds are currently built using a mix of m3/r3/c3 2xlarge AWS instances, depending on pricing and availability. We’re going to be looking to assess the effects on build speeds of using more powerful AWS instances types, as one potential way of reducing e2e Try times.


Creative Commons License
This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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