[NEW] Added build status updates - Usability improvements for Firefox automation initiative - Status update #6

[NEW] Starting on this newsletter we will start giving you build automation improvements since they help with the end to end time of your pushes

On this update we will look at the progress made in the last two weeks.

A reminder that 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:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/EngineeringProductivity/Projects/Debugging_UX_improvements

Status update:

Debugging tests on interactive workers

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Tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1262260

Accomplished recently:

• Fixed regression that broke the interactive wizard
• Support for Android reftests landed

Upcoming:

• Support for Android xpcshell
• Video demonstration

Thunder Try - Improve end to end times on try

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Project #1 - Artifact builds on automation

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Tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1284882

Accomplished recently:

• Windows and Mac artifact builds are soon to land
• |mach try| now supports --artifact option
• Compiled-code tests jobs error-out early when run with --artifact on try

Upcoming:

• Windows and Mac artifact builds available on Try
• Fix triggering of test jobs on Buildbot with artifact build

Project #2 - S3 Cloud Compiler Cache

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Tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280641

Nothing new in this edition.

Project #3 - Metrics

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Tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1286856

Accomplished recently:

• Drill-down charts:

• Which lead to a detailed view:

• With optional wait times included (missing 10% outliers, so looks almost the same):

Upcoming:

• Iron out interactivity bugs
• Show outliers
• Post these (static) pages to my people page
• Fix ActiveData production to handle these queries (I am currently using a development version of ActiveData, but that version has some nasty anomalies)

Project #4 - Build automation improvements

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Upcoming:

• We identified an interaction with EBS in AWS that is likely making several parts of automation slower than they should be (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1305174)

Project #5 - Run Web platform tests from the source checkout

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Accomplished recently:

• WPT is now running from the source checkout in automation

Upcoming:

• There are still parts in automation relying on a test zip. Next steps is to minimize those so you can get a loner, pull any revision from any repo, and test WPT changes in an environment that is exactly what the automation tests run in.

Other

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• Bug 1300812 - Make Mozharness downloads and unpacks actions handle better intermittent S3/EC2 issues
• This adds retry logic to reduce intermittent oranges

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

Increasing test coverage

Last quarter I spent some time increasing mozci's test coverage. Here are some notes I took to help me remember in the future how to do it.

Here's some of what I did:

• Read Python's page about increasing test coverage
• I wanted to learn what core Python recommends
• Tthey recommend is using coverage.py
• Quick start with coverage.py
• "coverage run --source=mozci -m py.test test" to gather data
• "coverage html" to generate an html report
• "/path/to/firefox firefox htmlcov/index.html" to see the report
• NOTE: We have coverage reports from automation in coveralls.io
• https://coveralls.io/github/mozilla/mozilla_ci_tools
• If you find code that needs to be ignored, read this.
• Use "# pragma: no cover" in specific lines
• You can also create rules of exclusion
• Once you get closer to 100% you might want to consider to increase branch coverage instead of line coverage
• Read more in here.
• Once you pick a module to increase coverage
• Keep making changes until you run "coverage run" and "coverage html".
• Reload the html page to see the new results

After some work on this, I realized that my preferred place to improve tests is focusing on the simplest unit tests. I say this since integration tests do require proper work and thinking how to properly test them rather than *just* increasing coverage for the sake of it.

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