JADE CI and automatic testing#

Brief introduction#

Following software developing best practices, JADE supports automating testing of its code and Continuous Integration (CI) on GitHub. These concepts are briefly described hereafter.

There are many ways to perform automatic testing on code. The choice fell upon unit testing which is commonly used in software development and consists of stress-testing single units of code, i.e., the minimal portion of the software that have an autonomous operation like single classes or methods. These set of tests are usually defined with the help of specific libraries and are automated in order to be executed frequently.

This approach guarantees a series of advantages:

  • it is easier to accept new features from new developers because the risk of them breaking the code will be way lower if it passed the tests;

  • it generally improves the reliability of the code;

  • it enhances the stability of the code through the years, since, when a bug is found, it is good practice to add a specific test able to catch it and ensure that it will never present itself again in the future;

  • it generally improves the quality of the code since unit testing forces developers to write code in a more schematic and clear way (retrofitting unit testing to code already written, on the contrary, can cause a bit of an headache);

  • if done correctly, it can actually speed up the development of new features when the complexity of the code is high due to a more easy identification of the issues (i.e. the failed tests).

Unit testing is also a key component of the so-called Continuous Integration (CI) which is needed when many developers start to collaborate to the same project. In order to do so, each of them will work on a local copy of the code which will gradually become less representative of the master repository due to the constant modifications applied by others. If a single developer waits too much before committing his modifications to the master repository, the main code could have become so different that trying to merge a commitment with success (i.e. without conflicts) could become more time consuming than just restart the development of the new feature from scratch. This situation is usually referred to as “integration hell” or “merge hell”. In short, continuous integration consists of committing your code modifications fast and often, trying to avoid at all costs integration hell and save effort and time. Tools like GitHub are instrumental to the diffusion of the CI philosophy thanks to it many collaborative features and robust version control. Nevertheless, key principles of the process are considered to be the automatic build and automatic testing of the code which need to be performed each time the master code is adjourned.

Testing in JADE#

Unit testing in JADE is defined and run with the help of the pytest module while the code test coverage is monitored through the coverage one.

The automatic testing and coverage reporting is performed automatically to pull requests and public branches but developers are strongly recommended to run the tests locally before issuing a pull request.