By cyberswat on

There has been a good deal of recent discussion regarding the upcoming Code Sprint in Paris, but what exactly is going on and why is it important? Kieran touches on some of the core problems we are trying to solve in his post How to test 20 000 Drupal 7 core patches. To summarize, based on statistics for Drupal 5 and 6, it is expected that the Drupal 7 development cycle will have 20,000 patches with 1,200 or more core contributors. In order to handle that magnitude of contributions and have a quality product at the end of development the community has two options. Option one is to enact a code freeze on Drupal 7 beginning July 15th to allow sufficient manual testing. Option two is to enable an automated approach to testing that will allow the code freeze to be postponed until November 15th ... an additional 4 months of quality development time.

Although many people are hearing about this for the first time, there has been a substantial amount of contributions and effort put into solving these issues for Drupal 7. http://testing.drupal.org is the primary public face of these efforts. It is our plan to help continue these efforts by having a code sprint involving key developers. The upcoming DrupalCamp in Paris has been targetted as the meeting place to help offset the recent travels of several developers to the Boston Drupalcon. Key contributors for this project and planned attendees include:

  • Károly Négyesi - confirmed, funded by NowPublic - will be working with Rok and Dries to figure out how to handle 2,000 tests in a four month period.
  • Rok Žlender - confirmed, funded by NowPublic - will be working with Károly and Dries to figure out how to handle 2,000 tests in a four month period.
  • Charlie Gordon - confirmed, sponsored by Google - will be working with all to write unit testing
  • Jimmy Berry - confirmed, sponsored by Google- will be working with all to write unit testing and provide additional SimpleTest resources.
  • Kevin Bridges - confirmed, sponsored by pingVision - will be working with Rok and Douglas to finish automated testing of HEAD
  • Douglas Hubler - confirmed, funded by Acquia - will be working with Rok and Kevin to finish automated testing of HEAD
  • Dries Buytaert - confirmed, funded by Acquia - will be working with all to ensure success.

Outcomes

  • integrated plan for testing, including
    • unit testing
    • functional testing
    • automated patch testing
    • javascript testing plan
    • improve automated test creation tools
    • infrastructure testing plan
    • coverage metrics
  • improve consistency and quality of tests
  • better understanding of current state of testing
  • increased test coverage for critical areas; larger number and variety of tests
  • infrastructure for accepting and integrating community developed tests
  • improvements for http://testing.drupal.org

Deliverables

  • high-level plan for testing
  • standards / guidelines / best practices / templates
  • significant number of new tests to increase coverage, focusing on key areas
  • review / state of current tests report
  • plan for and initial implementation for test submission and management process

Next Steps

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x