Static Analysis tests

[Nate Finch]

Maybe we're not as far apart as I thought at first.

My thought was that they'd live under github.com/juju/juju/devrules (or
some other name) and therefore only get run during a full test run or if
you run them there specifically.  What is a full test run if not a test of
all our code?  These tests just happen to test all the code at once, rather
than piece by piece.  Combining with the other thread, if we also marked
them as skipped under -short, you could easily still run go test ./...
-short from the root of the juju repo and not incur the extra 16.5 seconds
(gocheck has a nice feature where if you call c.Skip() in the SetUpSuite,
it skips all the tests in the suite, which is particularly appropriate to
these tests, since it's the SetUpSuite that takes all the time).

Mostly, I just didn't want them to live off in a separate repo or run with
a separate tool.

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 11:39 PM Andrew Wilkins <
andrew.wilkins at canonical.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 11:14 AM Nate Finch <nate.finch at canonical.com>
> wrote:
>
>> From the other thread:
>>
>> I wrote a test that parses the entire codebase under github.com/juju/juju to
>> look for places where we're creating a new value of crypto/tls.Config
>> instead of using the new helper function that I wrote that creates one with
>> more secure defaults.  It takes 16.5 seconds to run on my machine.  There's
>> not really any getting around the fact that parsing the whole tree takes a
>> long time.
>>
>> What I *don't* want is to put these tests somewhere else which requires
>> more thought/setup to run.  So, no separate long-tests directory or
>> anything.  Keep the tests close to the code and run in the same way we run
>> unit tests.
>>
>
> The general answer to this belongs back in the other thread, but I agree
> that long-running *unit* tests (if there should ever be such a thing)
> should not be shunted off to another location. Keep the unit tests with the
> unit. Integration tests are a different matter, because they cross multiple
> units. Likewise, tests for project policies.
>
> Andrew's response:
>>
>>
>> *The nature of the test is important here: it's not a test of Juju
>> functionality, but a test to ensure that we don't accidentally use a TLS
>> configuration that doesn't match our project-wide constraints. It's static
>> analysis, using the test framework; and FWIW, the sort of thing that Lingo
>> would be a good fit for.*
>>
>> *I'd suggest that we do organise things like this separately, and run
>> them as part of the "scripts/verify.sh" script. This is the sort of test
>> that you shouldn't need to run often, but I'd like us to gate merges on.*
>>
>> So, I don't really think the method of testing should determine where a
>> test lives or how it is run.  I could test the exact same things with a
>> more common unit test - check the tls config we use when dialing the API is
>> using tls 1.2, that it only uses these specific ciphersuites, etc.  In
>> fact, we have some unit tests that do just that, to verify that SSL is
>> disabled.  However, then we'd need to remember to write those same tests
>> for every place we make a tls.Config.
>>
>
> The method of testing is not particularly relevant; it's the *purpose*
> that matters. You could probably use static analysis for a lot of our
> units; it would be inappropriate, but they'd still be testing units, and so
> should live with them.
>
> The point I was trying to make is that this is not a test of one unit, but
> a policy that covers the entire codebase. You say that you don't want to it
> put them "somewhere else", but it's not at all clear to me where you think
> we *should* have them.
>
>> The thing I like about having this as part of the unit tests is that it's
>> zero friction.  They already gate landings.  We can write them and run them
>> them just like we write and run go tests 1000 times a day.  They're not
>> special.  There's no other commands I need to remember to run, scripts I
>> need to remember to set up.  It's go test, end of story.
>>
>
> Using the Go testing framework is fine. I only want to make sure we're not
> slowing down the edit/test cycle by frequently testing things that are
> infrequently going to change. It's the same deal as with integration tests;
> there's a trade-off between the time spent and confidence level.
>
>> The comment about Lingo is valid, though I think we have room for both in
>> our processes.  Lingo, in my mind, is more appropriate at review-time,
>> which allows us to write lingo rules that may not have 100% confidence.
>> They can be strong suggestions rather than gating rules.  The type of test
>> I wrote should be a gating rule - there are no false positives.
>>
>> To give a little more context, I wrote the test as a suite, where you can
>> add tests to hook into the code parsing, so we can trivially add more tests
>> that use the full parsed code, while only incurring the 16.5 second parsing
>> hit once for the entire suite.  That doesn't really affect this discussion
>> at all, but I figured people might appreciate that this could be extended
>> for more than my one specific test.  I certainly wouldn't advocate people
>> writing new 17 seconds tests all over the place.
>>
>
> That sounds lovely, thank you.
>
> Cheers,
> Andrew
>
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