Testing standards and style guidelines
This document describes various guidelines and best practices for automated testing of the GitLab project.
It is meant to be an extension of the thoughtbot testing styleguide. If this guide defines a rule that contradicts the thoughtbot guide, this guide takes precedence. Some guidelines may be repeated verbatim to stress their importance.
Overview
GitLab is built on top of Ruby on Rails, and we're using RSpec for all the backend tests, with Capybara for end-to-end integration testing. On the frontend side, we're using Karma and Jasmine for JavaScript unit and integration testing.
Following are two great articles that everyone should read to understand what automated testing means, and what are its principles:
- Five Factor Testing: Why do we need tests?
- Principles of Automated Testing: Levels of testing. Prioritize tests. Cost of tests.
Testing levels
Learn about the different testing levels, and how to decide at what level your changes should be tested.
Testing best practices
Everything you should know about how to write good tests: RSpec, FactoryBot, system tests, parameterized tests etc.
Frontend testing standards and style guidelines
Everything you should know about how to write good Frontend tests: Karma, testing promises, stubbing etc.
Flaky tests
What are flaky tests, the different kind of flaky tests we encountered, and what we do about them.
GitLab tests in the Continuous Integration (CI) context
How GitLab test suite is run in the CI context: setup, caches, artifacts, parallelization, monitoring.
Testing Rake tasks
Everything you should know about how to test Rake tasks.
End-to-end tests
Everything you should know about how to run end-to-end tests using GitLab QA testing framework.
Spinach (feature) tests
GitLab moved from Cucumber to Spinach for its feature/integration tests in September 2012.
As of March 2016, we are trying to avoid adding new Spinach tests going forward, opting for RSpec feature specs.
Adding new Spinach scenarios is acceptable only if the new scenario requires
no more than one new step definition. If more than that is required, the
test should be re-implemented using RSpec instead.