Google Summer of Code 2021 and Test automation

Development
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Hello, my name is Boris, I’m a Master student and I’m quite interested in participating in GSOC 2021. I’ve installed XWiki locally on my machine and tried it a bit. By the way, I’ve been administrating some MediaWiki-based sites for many years — will this experience be applicable while dealing with XWiki?

I have Java (and some other languages) programming skills, but haven’t much tried frameworks for web development. Of course, I’m familiar with HTML, CSS and vanilla JS. What I’m currently doing is test automation with Java (both UI and API). So my main question is: does XWiki use test automation? Would it be a suitable idea for a GSOC 2021 proposal? I don’t mind either enhancing an existing automation project or developing one from scratch, using the Page Object and API Client patterns.
Looking forward to some advice.

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Hi Boris. Cool.

Yes, a lot :slight_smile: See https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Testing/

We always need more tests and to fix flickering UI tests so that could be interesting. However these are hard and complex topics so you’d need to show that you have the knowledge for that.

I guess you could prove this by writing a UI test for one of the tests we miss: Loading...

WDYT?

Thanks for proposing and welcome in the XWiki community! :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the links, sounds good. So I need to create a pull request covering one of those tests and attach it to the GSOC proposal, right?

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I see the following tasks as separate:

  • Create a proposal related to the testing field. Here are several topics that are of interest to the XWiki project and that could be in your proposal:
    • Write missing tests (Loading...)
    • Finish converting tests written using JUnit 3.x/4.x and using JMock into JUnit 5.x/Mockito tests
    • Convert selenium-based UI tests (and any functional tests such as upgrade tests) into docker-based tests that can execute on various configurations
    • Analyze and fix flickering UI tests
  • In parallel to the proposal, we ask students to interact with the community and to fix some issues to show their knowledge and as a way for us to evaluate the ability of the student to implement the project, see https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/GoogleSummerOfCode/Guidelines#HIncreasingyourchancesofbeingacceptedasastudent. Thus, as part of this, I’m proposing to you that you work on adding just one UI tests from the list of missing tests at Loading... as a way to prove to us that you have the knowledge. If you don’t succeed, it won’t be a blocker but we’ll be able to evaluate the questions you ask, the knowledge you have, how we interact, etc, during the process.

WDYT?

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