On 20/05/2021 22.28, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
On 5/20/21 9:53 PM, Willian Rampazzo wrote:
Conceptually speaking, acceptance tests "are a series of specific tests
conducted by the customer in an attempt to uncover product errors before
accepting the software from the developer. Conducted by the end-user rather
than software engineers, acceptance testing can range from an informal
“test drive” to a planned and systematically executed series of scripted
tests" [1]. Every time Pressman refers to the term "acceptance testing," he
also refers to user's agreement in the final state of an implemented feature.
Today, QEMU is not implementing user acceptance tests as described by Pressman.
There are other three possible terms we could use to describe what is currently
QEMU "acceptance" tests:
1 - Integration tests:
- "Integration testing is a systematic technique for constructing the
software architecture while at the same time conducting tests to
uncover errors associated with interfacing. The objective is to take
unit-tested components and build a program structure that has been
dictated by design." [2]
* Note: Sommerville does not have a clear definition of integration
testing. He refers to incremental integration of components inside
the system testing (see [3]).
After thinking about this for a while, I agree with you that renaming the
"acceptance" tests to "integration" tests is also not a good idea. When I
hear "integration" test in the context of the virt stack, I'd rather expect
a test suite that picks KVM (i.e. a kernel), QEMU, libvirt and maybe
virt-manager on top and tests them all together. So we should look for a
different name indeed.
2 - Validation tests:
- "Validation testing begins at the culmination of integration testing,
when individual components have been exercised, the software is
completely assembled as a package, and interfacing errors have been
uncovered and corrected. At the validation or system level, the
distinction between different software categories disappears. Testing
focuses on user-visible actions and user-recognizable output from the
system." [4]
- "where you expect the system to perform correctly using a set of test
cases that reflect the system’s expected use." [5]
* Note: the definition of "validation testing" from Sommerville reflects
the same definition found around the Internet, as one of the processes
inside the "Verification & Validation (V&V)." In this concept,
validation testing is a high-level definition that covers unit testing,
functional testing, integration testing, system testing, and acceptance
testing.
3 - System tests:
- "verifies that all elements mesh properly and that overall system
function and performance is achieved." [6]
- "involves integrating components to create a version of the system and
then testing the integrated system. System testing checks that
components are compatible, interact correctly, and transfer the right
data at the right time across their interfaces." [7]
The tests implemented inside the QEMU "acceptance" directory depend on the
software completely assembled and, sometimes, on other elements, like operating
system images. In this case, the proposal here is to rename the current
"acceptance" directory to "system."
Are user-mode tests using Avocado also system tests?
https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg782505.html
We've indeed got the problem that the word "system" is a little bit
overloaded in the context of QEMU. We often talk about "system" when
referring to the qemu-softmmu-xxx emulators (in contrast to the linux-user
emulator binaries). For example, the "--disable-system" switch of the
configure script, or the "build-system" and "check-system" jobs in the
.gitlab-ci.yml file ... thus this could get quite confusing in the
.gitlab-ci.yml file afterwards.
So I think renaming "acceptance" to "system" is especially ok if we only
keep the "softmmu"-related tests in that folder... would it maybe make sense
to add the linux-user related tests in a separate folder called tests/user/
instead, Philippe? And we should likely rename the current build-system and
check-system jobs in our gitlab-CI to build-softmmu and check-softmmu or so?
Alternatively, what about renaming the "acceptance" tests to "validation"
instead? That word does not have a duplicated definition in the context of
QEMU yet, so I think it would be less confusing.
Thomas
