Thread: [GSoC 2021 Proposal] Developing Testing Suite for PGWEB

Hi Chirag,

On 4/6/21 11:21 AM, Chirag Kasat wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> I am Chirag Kasat and I am interested in the following project for GSoC
> 2021. I would be grateful if you can have a look and give me suggestions
> to improve.
> This is the link to my draft proposal:
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V2FsPKmWdG8Ng0-p4ID3la_0sYAtYDD8MM1O55b-cCQ/edit?usp=sharing 
> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V2FsPKmWdG8Ng0-p4ID3la_0sYAtYDD8MM1O55b-cCQ/edit?usp=sharing>
> I have also attached the PDF version.

Thank you for putting this proposal together. The overall approach
appears to be reasonable and will certainly help add some more assurance
around the pgweb codebase.

My recommendation would be around the scope of the project. I think it
is conceivable that you could easily spend the entire summer just
focused on the unit test portion of the project based upon both the size
of the codebase and current lack of test automation.

I have familiarity with Selenium as far back as when I was doing my own
summer college projects -- I know a lot has changed since then, but I
have often found that the cost of upkeeping a Selenium stack can often
outweigh the benefits. However, this was typically in a rapidly changing
environment -- the frontend of pgweb does not change all that often.

I don't know if we really need performance testing at this point in time
based on our traffic pattern and usage of varnish. It could certainly be
interesting to see, and may help identify a few areas we could optimize,
but I would certainly rank it below unit testing.

Accessibility testing would be very much welcome. Even having some
design guidelines on what we could do better on that front would be a
huge next step.

So in other words, my recommendations would be to focus on building up a
core set of unit tests along with a focus on how we can improve our
overall accessibility.

This is just one person's opinion, but I hope it provides a good
starting point on what to look at.

Thanks!

Jonathan

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 5:37 PM Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz@postgresql.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Chirag,
>
> On 4/6/21 11:21 AM, Chirag Kasat wrote:
> > Hello Everyone,
> > I am Chirag Kasat and I am interested in the following project for GSoC
> > 2021. I would be grateful if you can have a look and give me suggestions
> > to improve.
> > This is the link to my draft proposal:
> > https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V2FsPKmWdG8Ng0-p4ID3la_0sYAtYDD8MM1O55b-cCQ/edit?usp=sharing
> > <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V2FsPKmWdG8Ng0-p4ID3la_0sYAtYDD8MM1O55b-cCQ/edit?usp=sharing>
> > I have also attached the PDF version.
>
> Thank you for putting this proposal together. The overall approach
> appears to be reasonable and will certainly help add some more assurance
> around the pgweb codebase.
>
> My recommendation would be around the scope of the project. I think it
> is conceivable that you could easily spend the entire summer just
> focused on the unit test portion of the project based upon both the size
> of the codebase and current lack of test automation.
>
> I have familiarity with Selenium as far back as when I was doing my own
> summer college projects -- I know a lot has changed since then, but I
> have often found that the cost of upkeeping a Selenium stack can often
> outweigh the benefits. However, this was typically in a rapidly changing
> environment -- the frontend of pgweb does not change all that often.
>
> I don't know if we really need performance testing at this point in time
> based on our traffic pattern and usage of varnish. It could certainly be
> interesting to see, and may help identify a few areas we could optimize,
> but I would certainly rank it below unit testing.

To follow up on that one, I don't think we need "generic performance
testing", but as I understand the proposal it would also cover things
like "a page runs too many SQL queries" and *that* would be a very
useful thing to notice if it happens, as it can severely  effect the
cache miss performance, so that's always worth looking into.

I agree that it's probably not the most important part of things
though -- functionality testing is a lot *more* important.


> Accessibility testing would be very much welcome. Even having some
> design guidelines on what we could do better on that front would be a
> huge next step.
>
> So in other words, my recommendations would be to focus on building up a
> core set of unit tests along with a focus on how we can improve our
> overall accessibility.
>
> This is just one person's opinion, but I hope it provides a good
> starting point on what to look at.

Agreed on other accounts, and also to state that I definitely think
having a proper test suite for pgweb is going to be a great
enhancement.

-- 
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: https://www.hagander.net/
 Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/