User Guide

Platform detection

It’s very common to have one set of logic for Windows and another for all non-Windows (Unix-based) platforms, and PySys has a dedicated constant pysys.constants.IS_WINDOWS for that:

self.startProcess('myprogram.exe' if IS_WINDOWS else 'myprogram', ...)

For finer grained platform detection we recommend using the facilities built into Python, for example sys.platform, platform.platform() or platform.uname().

Skipping tests

If your tests’ .py logic detects that a test should not be executed for this platform or mode, simply use self.skipTest(...) near the top of the test’s execute() method, specifying the reason for the skip:

self.skipTest('MyFeature is not supported on Windows')

As well as setting the test outcome and reason, this will raise an exception ensuring that the rest of execute() and validate() do not get executed.

Alternatively if the test should be skipped regardless of platform/mode etc, it is best to specify that statically in your pysystest.* file:

__pysys_skipped_reason__   = "Skipped until Bug-1234 is fixed"

Or:

<skipped reason="Skipped until Bug-1234 is fixed"/>

Customizing pysys make

You can define templates that pysys make will use to create new tests specific to your project, or even multiple templates for individual directories within your project. This helps to encourage teams to follow the latest best practice by ensuring new tests are copying known good patterns, and also saves looking up how to do common things when creating new tests.

The pysys make command line comes with a pysys-default-test template for creating a simple PySys test, you can add your own by adding <maker-template> elements to pysysdirconfig.xml in any directory under your project, or to a <pysysdirconfig> element in your pysysproject.xml file. Here are a couple of examples (taken from the cookbook sample):

<pysysdirconfig>

        <maker-template name="my-test" description="a test with the Python code pre-customized to get things started"
                copy="./_pysys_templates/MyTemplateTest/*" />

        <maker-template name="perf-test" description="a performance test including configuration for my fictional performance tool"
                copy="${pysysTemplatesDir}/default-test/*, ./_pysys_templates/perf/my-perf-config.xml"/>

        <maker-template name="foobar-test" description="an advanced test based on the existing XXX test"
                copy="./PySysDirConfigSample/*"
                mkdir="ExtraDir1, ExtraDir2"
        >
                <replace regex='__pysys_title__ *= r"""[^"]*"""' with='__pysys_title__   = r""" Foobar - My new @{DIR_NAME} test title TODO """'/>
                <replace regex='__pysys_authors__ *= "[^"]*"'    with='__pysys_authors__ = "@{USERNAME}"'/>
                <replace regex='__pysys_created__ *= "[^"]*"'    with='__pysys_created__ = "@{DATE}"'/>
                <replace regex='@@DIR_NAME@@'                    with='@{DIR_NAME}'/>
        </maker-template>

</pysysdirconfig>

For customizing the PySysTest class the best approach is usually to create a pysystest.py template test containing @@DEFAULT_DESCRIPTOR@@ (or @@DEFAULT_DESCRIPTOR_MINIMAL@@) to include the default PySys descriptor values (this means your template will automatically benefit from any future changes to the defaults), and put it in a _pysys_templates/<templatename> directory alongside the pysystestdir.xml file. The _pysys_templates directory should contain a file named .pysysignore file (which avoids the template being loaded as a real test).

other options are possible (as above) e.g. copying files from an absolute location such as under your project’s ${testRootDir}, copying from PySys default templates directly (if you just want to add files) by using ${pysysTemplatesDir}/default-test/*, or copying from a path relative to the XML file where the template is defined containing a real (but simple) test to copy from (with suitable regex replacements to make it more generic).

See Sample pysysdirconfig.xml for more information about how to configure templates in a pysysdirconfig.xml file.

When creating tests using pysys make, by default the first template (from the most specific pysysdirconfig.xml) is selected, but you can also specify any other template by name using the -t option, and get a list of available templates for the current directory using --help.

It is possible to subclass the pysys.launcher.console_make.DefaultTestMaker responsible for this logic if needed. The main reason to do that is to provide a pysys.launcher.console_make.DefaultTestMaker.validateTestId method to check that new test ids do not conflict with others used by others in a remote version control system (to avoid merge conflicts).

By default PySys creates .py files with tabs for indentation (as in previous PySys releases). If you prefer spaces, just set the pythonIndentationSpacesPerTab project property to a string containing the required spaces per tab.

Checking for error messages in log files

The BaseTest.assertGrep() method is an easy way to check that there are no error messages in log files from processes started by PySys. Rather than checking for an expression such as ' ERROR: ', it is recommended to define your expression so that the error message itself is included, e.g.:

self.assertGrep('myprocess.log', expr=' ERROR: .*', contains=False)

This approach ensures that the error message itself is included in the test’s console output, run.log and the summary of failed test outcomes, which avoids the need to open up the individual logs to find out what happened, and makes it much easier to triage test failures, especially if several tests fail for the same reason.

Sharing logic across tests using plugins

Often you will have some standard logic that needs to be used in the execute or validation of many/all testcases, such as starting the application you’re testing, or checking log files for errors.

The recommended way to do that in PySys is to create one or more “plugins”. There are currently several kinds of plugin:

  • test plugins; instances of test plugins are created for each BaseTest that is instantiated, which allows them to operate independently of other tests, starting and stopping processes just like code in the BaseTest class would. Test plugins are configured with <test-plugin classname="..." alias="..."/> and can be any Python class provided it has a method setup(self, testobj) (and no constructor arguments). As the plugins are instantiated just after the BaseTest subclass, you can use them any time after (but not within) your test’s __init__() constructor (for example, in BaseTest.setup()).

  • runner plugins; these are instantiated just once per invocation of PySys, by the BaseRunner, before pysys.baserunner.BaseRunner.setup() is called. Unlike test plugins, any processes or state they maintain are shared across all tests. These can be used to start servers/VMs that are shared across tests. Runner plugins are configured with <runner-plugin classname="..." alias="..."/> and can be any Python class provided it has a method setup(self, runner) (and no constructor arguments).

    Runner plugins that generate output files/directories should by default put that output under either the runner.output directory, or (for increased prominence) the runner.output+'/..' directory (which is typically testRootDir unless an absolute --outdir path was provided).

  • writer plugins: this kind of plugin has existed in PySys for many releases and are effectively a special kind of runner plugin with extra callbacks to allow them to write test results and/or output files to a variety of destinations. Writers must implement a similar but different interface to other runner plugins; see pysys.writer for details. They can be used for everything from writing test outcome to an XML file, to archiving output files, to collecting files from each test output and using them to generate a code coverage report during cleanup at the end of the run.

To make your plugin configurable, add a static field for each plugin property, which defines the default value and (implicitly) the type. After construction of each plugin, an attribute is assigned with the actual value of each plugin property so each property can be accessed using self.propname (by the time the plugin’s setup method is called). In addition to plugin properties, pysys run -Xkey=value command line options for the plugin (if needed) can be accessed using the runner’s pysys.baserunner.BaseRunner.getXArg() method.

A test plugin could look like this:

class MyTestPlugin(object):
        myPluginProperty = 'default value'
        """
        Example of a plugin configuration property. The value for this plugin instance can be overridden using ``<property .../>``.
        Types such as boolean/list[str]/int/float will be automatically converted from string.
        """

        def setup(self, testObj):
                self.owner = self.testObj = testObj
                self.log = logging.getLogger('pysys.myorg.MyRunnerPlugin')
                self.log.info('Created MyTestPlugin instance with myPluginProperty=%s', self.myPluginProperty)

                # there is no standard cleanup() method, so do this if you need to execute something on cleanup:
                testObj.addCleanupFunction(self.__myPluginCleanup)

        def __myPluginCleanup(self):
                self.log.info('Cleaning up MyTestPlugin instance')

        # An example of providing a method that can be accessed from each test
        def getPythonVersion(self):
                self.owner.startProcess(sys.executable, arguments=['--version'], stdouterr='MyTestPlugin.pythonVersion')
                return self.owner.waitForGrep('MyTestPlugin.pythonVersion.out', '(?P<output>.+)')['output'].strip()

        # A common pattern is to create a helper method that you always call from your `BaseTest.validate()`
        # That approach allows you to later customize the logic by changing just one single place, and also to omit
        # it for specific tests where it is not wanted.
        def checkLogsForErrors(self, logfile="my_server.log"):
                self.assertGrep(logfile, ' (ERROR|FATAL) .*', contains=False)

With configuration like this:

<pysysproject>
        <test-plugin classname="myorg.testplugin.MyTestPlugin" alias="myalias">
                    <property name="myPluginProperty" value="my value"/>
        </test-plugin>
</pysysproject>

… you can now access methods defined by the plugin from your tests using self.myalias.getPythonVersion().

Alternatively, you can create a trivial BaseTest subclass that instantiates plugins in code (rather than XML) which would allow code completion (if your editor of choice supports this) but still provide the benefits of the modular composition approach.

You can add any number of test and/or runner plugins to your project, perhaps a mixture of custom plugins specific to your application, and third party PySys plugins supporting standard tools and languages.

In addition to the alias-based lookup, plugins can get a list of the other plugin instances using self.testPlugins (from BaseTest) or self.runnerPlugins (from pysys.baserunner.BaseRunner), which provides a way for plugins to reference each other without depending on the aliases that may be in use in a particular project configuration.

When creating a runner plugin you may need somewhere to put output files, logs etc. Plugins that generate output files/directories should by default put that output in a dedicated directory either the runner.output directory, or (for increased prominence if it’s something users will look at a lot) a directory one level up e.g. runner.output+'/../myplugin' (which is typically under testRootDir unless an absolute --outdir path was provided) . A prefix of double underscore __pysys is recommended under testRootDir to distinguish dynamically created directories (ignored by version control) from the testcase directories (checked into version control).

For examples of the project configuration, including how to set plugin-specific properties that will be passed to its constructor, see Project Configuration.

Configuring and overriding test options

PySys provides two mechanisms for specifying options such as credentials, hostnames, or test duration/iteration that you might want to change or override when running tests:

  • Testcase attributes, which are just variables on the Python testcase instance (or a BaseTest subclass shared by many tests). Attributes can be overridden on the command line using pysys run -Xattr=value.

    Attributes are useful for settings specific to an individual testcase such as the number of iterations or time duration to use for a performance test. A user running the test locally you might want to temporarily set to a lower iteration count while getting the test right, or perhaps try a higher value to get a more stable performance result.

  • Project properties. The default value is specified in the pysysproject.xml file or in a .properties file referenced from it.

    Properties can be overridden using an environment variable. Project properties are useful for things like credentials and hostnames that are shared across many testcases, and where you might want to set up customizations in your shell so that you don’t need to keep specifying them every time you invoke pysys run.

To use a testcase attribute, set the default value on your test or basetest as a static attribute on the test class, for example:

class PySysTest(BaseTest):

        myIterationCount = 100*1000 # can be overridden with -XmyIterationCount=

        def execute(self):
                self.log.info('Using iterations=%d', self.myIterationCount)
                ...

Once the default value is defined with a static attribute, you can override the value when you run your test using the -X option:

pysys run -XmyIterationCount=10

If the attribute was defined with a default value of int, float, bool or list then the -X value will be automatically converted to that type; otherwise, it will be a string.

If instead of setting a default for just one test you wish to set the default for many tests from your custom BaseTest subclass, then you would do the same thing in the definition of that BaseTest subclass. If you don’t have a custom BaseTest class, you can use self.runner.getXArg() from any plugin to get the value or default, with the same type conversion described above.

The other mechanism that PySys supports for configurable test options is project properties.

To use a project property that can be overridden with an environment variable, add a property element to your pysysproject.xml file:

<property name="myCredentials" value="${env.MYORG_CREDENTIALS}" default="testuser:testpassword"/>

This property can will take the value of the specified environment variable, or else the default if any undefined properties/env vars are included in value. Note that if the value contains unresolved variables and there is no valid default, the project will fail to load.

You may want to set the attribute pathMustExist="true" when defining properties that refer to a path such as a build output directory that should always be present.

Another way to specify default project property values is to put them into a .properties file. You can use properties to specify which file is loaded, so it would be possible to customize using environment variables:

<property name="myProjectPropertiesFile" value="${env.MYORG_CUSTOM_PROJECT_PROPERTIES}" default="${testRootDir}/default-config.properties"/>
<property file="${myProjectPropertiesFile}" pathMustExist="true"/>

To use projects properties in your testcase, just access the attributes on self.project from either a test instance or a runner:

def execute(self):
        username, password = self.project.myCredentials.split(':')
        self.log.info('Using username=%s and password=%s', username, password)

Project properties are always be of string type, but pysys.config.project.Project.getProperty() can be used to convert the value to other types when needed.

Thread-safety

As your testsuite grows, the ability to run tests in parallel will be increasingly important, so make sure your tests and any shared plugin code do not manipulate shared data structures or files in a way that could cause race conditions.

Most Python library functions are safe to use, but you should avoid calling locale.getpreferredencoding() (use pysys.constants.PREFERRED_ENCODING instead) and shutil.make_archive which are not.

It is also important not to change to the working directory of the PySys process or its environment (os.environ) while tests are executing. Any setup that might involve changing the environment - including initialization of some libraries (e.g. Matplotlib) must be performed before tests start in the setup of a runner plugin (or runner), so that everything is stable ready for tests to be executed.

To avoid dangerous and hard-to-debug race conditions, PySys has built-in checking for changes to the working directory and os.environ and the test run will fail if either is detected.

Producing code coverage reports

PySys can be extended to produce code coverage reports for any language, by creating a writer plugin.

There is an existing writer that produces coverage reports for programs written in Python called pysys.writer.coverage.PythonCoverageWriter, which uses the coverage.py library. To use this you need to add the <writer> to your project (see the sample Project Configuration for an example) and make sure you’re starting your Python processes with coverage support enabled, by using BaseTest.startPython.

The usual way to enable code coverage (for all supported languages) is to set -XcodeCoverage when running your tests (or to run with --ci which does this automatically). Individual writers may additionally provide their own properties to allow fine-grained control e.g. -XpythonCoverage=true/false.

Be sure to add the disableCoverage group to any tests (or test directories) that should not use coverage, such as performance tests.

If you wish to produce coverage reports using any other language, this is easy to achieve by following the same pattern:

  • When your tests start the program(s) whose coverage is to be measured, add the required arguments or environment variables to enable coverage using the coverage tool of your choice. The most convenient place to put helper methods for starting your application is in a custom test plugin class.

    When starting your process, you can detect whether to enable code coverage like this:

    if self.runner.getBoolProperty('mylanguageCoverage', default=self.runner.getBoolProperty('codeCoverage')) and not self.disableCoverage:
      ...

    Often you will need to set an environment variable to indicate the filename that coverage should be generated under. Make sure to use a unique filename so that multiple processes started by the same test do not clash. Often you will need to ensure that your application is shutdown cleanly (rather than being automatically killed at the end of the test) so that it has a chance to write the code coverage information.

  • Create a custom writer class which collects coverage files (matching a specific regex pattern) from the output directory. The usual way to do this would be to subclass pysys.writer.testoutput.CollectTestOutputWriter. Configure default values for main configuration properties (by defining them as static variables in your class). Then implement pysys.writer.api.BaseResultsWriter.isEnabled() to define when coverage reporting will happen, and run the required processes to combine coverage files and generate a report in the destDir in pysys.writer.api.BaseResultsWriter.cleanup(), which will execute after all tests have completed.

    Finally, add the new writer class to your pysysproject.xml file.

  • Add the disableCoverage group to any tests (or test directories) that should not use coverage, such as performance tests.

  • If using a continuous integration system or centralized code coverage database, you could optionally upload the coverage data there from the directory PySys collected it into, so there is a permanent record of any changes in coverage over time. The artifact publishing capability of pysys.writer.testoutput.CollectTestOutputWriter will help with that.

Running tests in multiple modes

One of the powerful features of PySys is the ability to run the same test in multiple modes from a single execution. This can be useful for both parameterized tests, where the same Python logic is invoked with multiple different parameters to test a range of scenarios, and for running tests against different databases, web browsers etc.

In PySys, a mode consists of a mode name, and a dictionary of parameters with detailed information about how to execute in that mode. The Python test can use self.mode.params to access the parameter dictionary, and self.mode to get the mode name.

During test execution, output files are kept separate by having mode executed from a different output directory, suffixed by ~ModeName.

When naming modes, TitleCase is recommended, and dot, underscore and equals characters may be used. Typically dot is useful for version numbers and underscore _ is useful for separating out different dimensions (e.g. compression vs authentication type in the example described later in this section). Separating dimensions cleanly in this way will make it much easier to include/exclude the test modes you want. PySys will give an error if you use different capitalization for the same mode in different places, as this can result in test bugs.

Using modes for parameterized tests

Parameterized tests provide a convenient way to re-use the same Python logic to check multiple different testing scenarios. This avoids the maintenance headache of copy+pasted testcases, and provides faster and more granular test outcomes than combining all the different parameters into a single test with a big for loop.

To specify modes for a parameterized test, just edit the pysystest.* file for your test, and provide a dictionary of ModeName: {ParameterDict} like this:

__pysys_parameterized_test_modes__ = {
                'Usage':        {'cmd': ['--help'], 'expectedExitStatus':'==0'},
                'BadPort':      {'cmd': ['--port', '-1'],  'expectedExitStatus':'!=0'},
                'MissingPort':  {'cmd': [],  'expectedExitStatus':'!=0'},
        }

This produces a test with 3 modes - named Usage, BadPort and MissingPort - for the various scenarios being checked. As you can see, it is possible to provide both input data, and data for use during validation. The test can easily access the parameters using expressions such as self.mode.params["cmd"].

It is also possible to provide the exact same configuration using the more advanced __pysys_modes__ field described below, however __pysys_parameterized_test_modes__ is easier for this use case, and automatically takes care of marking the parameterized modes as “primary” (so they will all run by default even specifying a --modes argument), and combining them with any inherited modes (e.g. for different databases, browsers, etc).

Using modes for other purposes

Modes can also be used for making your test run with different databases, web browsers, and other execution environments.

Often for these use cases you will want more control than parameterized tests give, for example it is likely you’ll want to execute with one database/browser in local test runs (probably the fastest one!) so you would not want all of them marked as primary modes. Additionally for these use cases the modes are often defined at a directory level for a collection of testcases rather in each individual test. You may also need precise control over which of the modes from a parent directory are inherited, since some modes may not be applicable to all tests.

All of these cases and more can be handled by the __pysys_modes__ configuration, which allows you to return a Python expression that returns the list (or dict) of modes for each test and/or pysysdirconfig. Since you will often need access to the inherited modes and (other useful methods and data) when defining your mode list, a helper object (pysys.config.descriptor.TestModesConfigHelper) is made available to your modes expression by the use of a Python lambda expression.

If you want to add some new modes in addition to the inherited ones, you would add this to your pysystest.py file:

__pysys_modes__ = lambda helper: helper.inheritedModes+[
                {'mode':'CompressionGZip', 'compressionType':'gzip'},
        ]

In large projects you may wish to configure modes in a pysysdirconfig.xml file in a parent directory rather than in pysystest.*, which will by default be inherited by all nested testcases (unless an explicit modes configuration is provided), and so that there’s a single place to edit the modes list if you need to change them later.

By default the first mode in each list is “primary”, so the test will only run in that one primary mode by default during local test runs (i.e. unless you supply a --modes or --ci argument). This is optimal when using modes to validate the same behaviour/conditions in different execution environments e.g. browsers/databases etc (but not for parameterized tests where you usually want to run all of them). It’s best to choose either the fastest mode or else the one that is most likely to show up interesting issues as the primary mode.

Sometimes your modes will have multiple dimensions, such as database, web browser, compression type, authentication type etc, and you may want your tests to run in all combinations of each item in each dimension list. Rather than writing out every combination manually, you can use the helper function pysys.config.descriptor.TestModesConfigHelper.createModeCombinations to automatically generate the combinations, passing it each dimension (e.g. each compression type) as a separate list.

Here is an example of multi-dimensional modes (taken from the getting-started sample):

__pysys_modes__ = lambda helper: [
                mode for mode in
                        helper.createModeCombinations( # Takes any number of mode lists as arguments and returns a single combined mode list

                                helper.inheritedModes,

                                {
                                                'CompressionNone': {'compressionType':None, 'isPrimary':True},
                                                'CompressionGZip': {'compressionType':'gzip'},
                                },

                                [
                                        {'auth':None}, # Mode name is optional
                                        {'auth':'OS'}, # In practice auth=OS modes will always be excluded since MyFunkyOS is a fictional OS
                                ],

                # This is Python list comprehension syntax for filtering the items in the list
                if (mode['auth'] != 'OS' or helper.import_module('sys').platform == 'MyFunkyOS')
        ]

This will create the following modes:

CompressionNone_Auth=None_Usage       [PRIMARY]
CompressionNone_Auth=None_BadPort     [PRIMARY]
CompressionNone_Auth=None_MissingPort [PRIMARY]
CompressionGZip_Auth=None_Usage
CompressionGZip_Auth=None_BadPort
CompressionGZip_Auth=None_MissingPort
CompressionNone_OS_Usage
CompressionNone_OS_BadPort
CompressionNone_OS_MissingPort
CompressionGZip_OS_Usage
CompressionGZip_OS_BadPort
CompressionGZip_OS_MissingPort

When creating multi-dimensional modes you can explicitly specify the name of each mode using 'mode':.., but if you want to avoid repeating the value of your parameters you can let PySys generate a default mode, which it does by taking each parameter concatenated with _; parameters with non-string values (e.g. None in the above example) are additionally qualified with paramName= to make the meaning clear.

The above example also shows how a Python list comprehension can be used to filter prevent the Auth=OS modes from being added on some operation systems (in this example, on all non-fictional operating systems!).

You can find the mode that this test is running in using self.mode, which returns an instance of pysys.config.descriptor.TestMode that subclasses a str of the mode name, as well as the parameters via a params field.

You can also use Python list comprehensions to generate sets of modes from a range like this:

__pysys_modes__   = lambda helper: helper.createModeCombinations(
                helper.inheritedModes,
                [ {'mode':'CompressionGZip', 'compressionType':'gzip'}, ],
                [ {'serverThreads': t} for t in range(1, 3) ],
        )

Here’s an example showing how a test plugin might use modes configuration to configure the test object during test setup:

class MyTestPlugin(object):
        def setup(self, testObj):
                # This is a convenient pattern for specifying the method or class
                # constructor to call for each mode, and to get an exception if an
                # invalid mode is specified
                dbHelperFactory = {
                        'MockDatabase': MockDB,
                        'MyDatabase2.0': lambda: self.startMyDatabase('2.0')
                }[testObj.mode.params['database']]
                ...
                # Call the supplied method to start/configure the database
                testObj.db = dbHelperFactory()

Executing modes with pysys run

PySys provides a rich variety of pysys run arguments to control which modes your tests will run with. By default it will run every test in its primary modes (for tests with no mode, the primary mode is self.mode==None) - which is great for quick checks during development of your application and testcases.

Your main test run (perhaps in a CI job) probably wants to run tests in all modes:

pysys run --mode ALL

(In practice you would use --ci which does the above and also sets some other useful defaults).

You can also specify specifies modes to run in, or to run everything except specified modes, or even use regular expressions for even more flexibility:

pysys run --mode MyMode1,MyMode2
pysys run --mode !MyMode3,!MyMode4
pysys run --mode MyMode.*

After successfully getting all your tests passing in their primary modes, it could be useful to run them in every mode other than the primary:

pysys run --mode !PRIMARY

For reporting purposes, all testcases must have a unique id. With a multiple mode test this is achieved by having the id automatically include a ~Mode suffix. If you are reporting performance results from a multi-mode test, make sure you include the mode in the resultKey when you all BaseTest.reportPerformanceResult, since the resultKey must be globally unique.

In addition to the --mode argument which affects all selected tests, it is possible to run a specific test in a specific mode. This can be useful when you have a few miscellaneous test failures and just want to re-run the failing tests:

pysys run MyTest_001~MockDatabase MyTest_020~MyDatabase_2.0

Performance tests - recording results

PySys is a great tool for running performance tests, whether unit-level microbenchmarks or complex multi-process full system benchmarking.

Often performance tests will produced detailed output files (XML/JSON/PDF/logs etc) that are worth capturing for analysis by a human, or for storing as a long term audit of how this build performed. To do this, you can add a pysys.writer.testoutput.CollectTestOutputWriter to your project configuration. This writer collects files matching a specified pattern from the output directory after each test, and puts them in a single directory or archive at the end of the test run.

Whether or not you have some detailed files to stash, it is worth also using BaseTest.reportPerformanceResult, the powerful built-in capability for storing some summary numbers for each test. In complex tests you probably won’t want to record every possible statistic - since that can quickly overwhelm once the total number of number of tests grows; a better strategy is to select a few representative data points from each test/mode combination. By default the numeric results are written to a CSV file (along with the runner’s runDetails dictionary including things like OS, CPU count, hostname and git commit of your source changes). There is also a reporter available for writing in a simple JSON format, and another that produces a textual summary of the results at the end of the run. You can also create your own reporters (e.g. to publish to an in-house database) using the pysys.perf API.

The BaseTest.reportPerformanceResult documentation gives the details, but one point that’s worth stressing is that every result should be identified by a short, unique, human-friendly resultKey which should give an at-a-glance definition of what is being recorded such as Message send rate with 3 topics and small 100kB messages using MyMessagingVendor. For maximum benefit, design your keys so that when sorted (imagine a big list of 100+ numbers from all your testcases!) you’ll see closely related results next to each other. These keys must be unique - so if a test runs in multiple modes (e.g. messaging/database vendors) then you must add some kind of string to the result key to indicate which it is running in, otherwise PySys will raise an exception and not persist the result. See the samples for some examples of using this API.

Performance tests - design considerations

Often a performance test will run for a bit longer than a simple correctness test, for example it might have a set number of iterations or time duration. See the above section “Configuring and overriding test options” for an example of how to make it easy to customize the iteration count/duration at runtime e.g. pysys run -XmyIterationCount=10. You may find you want to run your test super-quick in the early stages until it executes the steps correctly. When tracking down performance problems you might want to try running it for longer than usual to get more reliable results.

It is common to have a single performance test that should run with different parameters, for example against different databases, or perhaps with a variety of incoming message sizes. Avoid copy+pasting tests for this use case (which would be a maintenance nightmare). It is also a bad idea to add a giant “for” loop into your test and make it do everything in one invocation, since then it’s very difficult to surgically re-run problematic parts of your parameter matrix when tracking down test bugs or optimizing your application. Instead use the built-in “modes” concept of PySys which is perfect for the job. It can even generate a combinatoric product of various different parameter dimensions for you with pysys.config.descriptor.TestModesConfigHelper.createModeCombinations as described above.

Performance tests - running them

When running performance tests from an automated job, it is important to ensure that you do not have multiple tests executing at once since this will usually invalidate the results. It is therefore best to run your performance tests in a separate pysys run invocation to your correctness testing, which does benefit from multi-threaded execution. You should also disable code coverage in a performance run to avoid artificially slowing your components down. So a typical automated performance run would need to modify the usual --ci default into something like:

cd performance/
pysys run --ci --threads=1 -XcodeCoverage=false

When running performance tests locally to investigate a performance bug, it can be incredibly valuable to run multiple cycles of each test to generate a more stable baseline, and also to give you a measurable indication of how variable your results are. There is no point trying to track down a 10% performance regression from a test whose normal variation is +/-50%! It is also worth customizing the --outdir to assign a human-friendly label each time you do a run against a different build of your application. The outdir is recorded with the performance numbers and also allows you to avoid overwriting previous detailed logging output when doing a new run. So a typical local execution of a performance test would be:

pysys run -c5 --outdir=with-foobar-optimization MyTest~MyMode

You may wish to focus on just one mode, or all modes (--modes=ALL) or a specific subset of the modes (perhaps using a regular expression on the command line to indicate which modes are needed). At the end of the test run PySys will print a summary of the results, including a calculation of the sample standard deviation (if cycles > 1) which you can use to check your test is reliable and to decide whether measured increases/decreases are statistically significant or just random noise.

Performance tests - comparing results

When using PySys tests to measure your application while you experiment with possible optimizations, consider listing the .csv (or .json) summary files containing your baselines (e.g. baseline before any changes, with optimization A, B, C etc…) in the PYSYS_PERFORMANCE_BASELINES environment variable. The pysys.perf.reporters.PrintSummaryPerformanceReporter will print a textual comparison from each of the listed baselines to the current result. You can also run comparisons from the command line at any time by running the pysys/perf/perfreportstool.py script.

When reviewing comparisons, note that some numbers are “better” when large (e.g. rate of sending messages/transactions) while others are “worse” when large (e.g. latency or response time). The comparison tries to avoid confusion when looking at such results side by side, by showing “+” results for all improvements and “-” when things got worse. For each comparison, it prints the %improvement (with a + for bigger-is-better increases and - for reductions, and vice-versa), and the speedup ratio (newValue/oldValue for bigger-is-better, or oldValue/newValue for smaller is better). Typically the % is useful for small changes (< 100%) whereas the speedup ratio is more friendly for large changes (e.g. 3.5x faster). Provided multiple samples are available (from a multi-cycle run), it calculates the standard deviation (using whichever is the larger of the old and new stdDevs) and expresses the improvement delta as a ratio of the standard deviation (aka “sigma”) to give a “sigmas” value which indicates statistically how significant the result is - above +/- 1 sigma means there is a 68% chance the change is a real (significant) one, and above +/- 2 sigmas shows a 95% probability of significance. Results with less than 2 sigmas are not colour-coded since they typically don’t indicate a real change; anything with a red or green colour is a regression or improvement that is statistically significant and worth paying attention to.

Test ids and structuring large projects

Firstly, try to have everything in a single PySys project if possible. Use subdirectories to structure your tests, but don’t separate into different PySys projects unless it’s for testing a totally different component with different testing needs. Keeping everything in the same project gives you the ability to run all your tests (unit/correctness/perf) from a single command line which could be useful in the future even if you don’t need it right now.

Each test has a unique id which is used in various places such as when reporting passed/failed outcomes. By default the id is just the name of the directory containing the pysystest.* file.

You can choose a suitable naming convention for your tests. For example, you might wish to differentiate with just a numeric suffix such as:

MyApp_001
MyApp_002
MyApp_003

This has the benefit that it’s easy to refer to tests when communicating with other developers, and that you can run tests on the command line by specifying just a number, but you have to look at the test title to discover what it does.

Alternatively you could choose to use a semantically meaningful name for each test:

MyApp_TimeoutValueWorks
MyApp_TimeoutInvalidValuesAreRejected
MyApp_ValidCredentialsAreAccepted

These test ids are easier to understand but can’t be referred to as concisely.

Whatever scheme you use for naming test ids, if you have a large set of tests you will want to separate them out into different directories, so that related tests can be executed and maintained together. You might have different directories for different subsystems/parts of your application, and/or for different kinds of testing:

/  (root dir containing pysysproject.xml)

/SubSystem1/unit/
/SubSystem1/correctness/
/SubSystem1/long-running/
/SubSystem1/performance/

/SubSystem2/unit/
/SubSystem2/correctness/
/SubSystem2/long-running/
/SubSystem2/performance/
etc.

It is important to ensure every test has a unique id. Although it would be possible to do this by convention in the individual test directory names, this is fragile and could lead to clashes if someone forgets. Therefore for large projects it is usually best to add a pysysdirconfig.xml file to provide default configuration for each directory of testcases.

For example, in SubSystem1/performance you could create a pysysdirconfig.xml file containing:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<pysysdirconfig>
  <id-prefix>SubSystem1_perf.</id-prefix>

  <classification>
        <groups inherit="true">
          <group>subsystem1</group>
          <group>performance</group>
          <group>disableCoverage</group>
        </groups>

        <modes inherit="true">
        </modes>

  </classification>

  <execution-order hint="-100.0"/>

  <!-- Uncomment this to mark all tests under this directory as skipped
        (overrides the state= attribute on individual tests). -->
  <!-- <skipped reason=""/> -->

</pysysdirconfig>

This serves several useful purposes:

  • It adds a prefix “SubSystem1_perf.” to the beginning of the test directory names to ensure there’s a unique id for each one with no chance of conflicts across different directories.

  • It adds groups that make it possible to run all your performance tests, or all your tests for a particular part of the application, in a single command.

  • It disables code coverage instrumentation which could adversely affect your performance results.

  • It specifies that the performance tests will be run with a lower priority, so they execute after more urgent (and quicker) tests such as unit tests.

  • It provides the ability to temporarily skip a set of tests if they are broken temporarily pending a bug fix.

By default both modes and groups are inherited from pysysdirconfig.xml files in parent directories, but inheriting can be disabled in an individual descriptor by providing an explicit list of modes, in case you have a few tests that only make sense in one mode. Alternatively, you could allow the tests to exist in all modes but call self.skipTest <BaseTest.skipTest> at the start of the test BaseTest.execute method if the test cannot execute in the current mode.

See the Sample pysysdirconfig.xml for a full example of a directory configuration file.

Controlling execution order

In large projects where the test run takes several hours or days, you may wish to control the order that PySys executes different groups of tests - or tests with different modes, to maximize the chance of finding out quickly if something has gone wrong, and perhaps to prioritize running fast unit and correctness tests before commencing on longer running performance or soak tests.

By default, PySys runs tests based on the sorting them by the full path of the pysystest.* files. If you have tests with multiple modes, PySys will run all tests in their primary modes first, then any/all tests which list a second mode, followed by 3rd, 4th, etc.

All of this can be customized using the concept of an execution order hint. Every test descriptor is assigned an execution order hint, which is a positive or negative floating point number which defaults to 0.0, and is used to sort the descriptors before execution. Higher execution order hints mean later execution. If two tests have the same hint, PySys falls back on using the path of the pysystest.* file to determine a canonical order.

The hint for each test is generated by adding together hint components from the following:

  • A test-specific hint from the pysystest.* file’s __pysys_execution_order_hint__ = `` or ``<execution-order hint="..."/>. If the hint is not specified (the default), the test inherits any hint specified in a pysysdirconfig.xml file in an ancestor folder, or 0.0 if there aren’t any. Note that hints from pysysdirconfig.xml files are not added together; instead, the most specific wins.

  • All <execution-order> elements in the project configuration file which match the mode and/or group of the test. The project configuration is the place to put mode-specific execution order hints, such as putting a particular database or web browser mode earlier/later. See the sample Project Configuration file for details.

  • For multi-mode tests, the secondaryModesHintDelta specified in the project configuration (unless it’s set to zero), multiplied by a number indicating which mode this is. If a test had 3 modes Mode1, Mode2 and Mode3 then the primary mode(s) (Mode1) would get no additional hint, Mode2 would get secondaryModesHintDelta added to its hint and Mode3 would get 2 x secondaryModesHintDelta added to its hint. This is the mechanism PySys uses to ensure all tests run first in their primary modes before any tests run in their secondary modes. Usually the default value of secondaryModesHintDelta = +100.0 is useful and avoids the need for too much mode-specific hint configuration (see above). However if you prefer to turn it off to have more manual control - or you prefer each test to run in all modes before moving on to the next test - then simply set secondaryModesHintDelta to 0.

For really advanced cases, you can programmatically set the executionOrderHint on each descriptor by providing a custom pysys.config.descriptor.DescriptorLoader or in the constructor of a custom pysys.baserunner.BaseRunner class or plugin.