Test Framework Overview

Testing developer guide

Introduction

The OPNFV testing ecosystem is wide.

The goal of this guide consists in providing some guidelines for new developers involved in test areas.

For the description of the ecosystem, see [DEV1].

Developer journey

There are several ways to join test projects as a developer. In fact you may:

  • Develop new test cases
  • Develop frameworks
  • Develop tooling (reporting, dashboards, graphs, middleware,...)
  • Troubleshoot results
  • Post-process results

These different tasks may be done within a specific project or as a shared resource accross the different projects.

If you develop new test cases, the best practice is to contribute upstream as much as possible. You may contact the testing group to know which project - in OPNFV or upstream - would be the best place to host the test cases. Such contributions are usually directly connected to a specific project, more details can be found in the user guides of the testing projects.

Each OPNFV testing project provides test cases and the framework to manage them. As a developer, you can obviously contribute to them. The developer guide of the testing projects shall indicate the procedure to follow.

Tooling may be specific to a project or generic to all the projects. For specific tooling, please report to the test project user guide. The tooling used by several test projects will be detailed in this document.

The best event to meet the testing community is probably the plugfest. Such an event is organized after each release. Most of the test projects are present.

The summit is also a good opportunity to meet most of the actors [DEV4].

Be involved in the testing group

The testing group is a self organized working group. The OPNFV projects dealing with testing are invited to participate in order to elaborate and consolidate a consistant test strategy (test case definition, scope of projects, resources for long duration, documentation, ...) and align tooling or best practices.

A weekly meeting is organized, the agenda may be amended by any participant. 2 slots have been defined (US/Europe and APAC). Agendas and minutes are public. See [DEV3] for details. The testing group IRC channel is #opnfv-testperf

Best practices

All the test projects do not have the same maturity and/or number of contributors. The nature of the test projects may be also different. The following best practices may not be acurate for all the projects and are only indicative. Contact the testing group for further details.

Repository structure

Most of the projects have a similar structure, which can be defined as follows:

`-- home
  |-- requirements.txt
  |-- setup.py
  |-- tox.ini
  |
  |-- <project>
  |       |-- <api>
  |       |-- <framework>
  |       `-- <test cases>
  |
  |-- docker
  |     |-- Dockerfile
  |     `-- Dockerfile.aarch64.patch
  |-- <unit tests>
  `- docs
     |-- release
     |   |-- release-notes
     |   `-- results
     `-- testing
         |-- developer
         |     `-- devguide
         |-- user
               `-- userguide
API

Test projects are installing tools and triggering tests. When it is possible it is recommended to implement an API in order to perform the different actions.

Each test project should be able to expose and consume APIs from other test projects. This pseudo micro service approach should allow a flexible use of the different projects and reduce the risk of overlapping. In fact if project A provides an API to deploy a traffic generator, it is better to reuse it rather than implementing a new way to deploy it. This approach has not been implemented yet but the prerequisites consiting in exposing and API has already been done by several test projects.

CLI

Most of the test projects provide a docker as deliverable. Once connected, it is possible to prepare the environement and run tests through a CLI.

Dockerization

Dockerization has been introduced in Brahmaputra and adopted by most of the test projects. Docker containers are pulled on the jumphost of OPNFV POD. <TODO Jose/Mark/Alec>

Code quality

It is recommended to control the quality of the code of the testing projects, and more precisely to implement some verifications before any merge:

  • pep8
  • pylint
  • unit tests (python 2.7)
  • unit tests (python 3.5)

The code of the test project must be covered by unit tests. The coverage shall be reasonable and not decrease when adding new features to the framework. The use of tox is recommended. It is possible to implement strict rules (no decrease of pylint score, unit test coverages) on critical python classes.

Third party tooling

Several test projects integrate third party tooling for code quality check and/or traffic generation. Some of the tools can be listed as follows:

Project Tool Comments
Bottlenecks TODO  
Functest Tempest Rally Refstack RobotFramework OpenStack test tooling OpenStack test tooling OpenStack test tooling Used for ODL tests
QTIP Unixbench RAMSpeed nDPI openSSL inxi  
Storperf TODO  
VSPERF TODO  
Yardstick Moongen Trex Pktgen IxLoad, IxNet SPEC Unixbench RAMSpeed LMBench Iperf3 Netperf Pktgen-DPDK Testpmd L2fwd Fio Bonnie++ Traffic generator Traffic generator Traffic generator Traffic generator Compute Compute Compute Compute Network Network Network Network Network Storage Storage

Testing group configuration parameters

Testing categories

The testing group defined several categories also known as tiers. These categories can be used to group test suites.

Category Description
Healthcheck Simple and quick healthcheck tests case
Smoke Set of smoke test cases/suites to validate the release
Features Test cases that validate a specific feature on top of OPNFV. Those come from Feature projects and need a bit of support for integration
Components Tests on a specific component (e.g. OpenStack, OVS, DPDK,..) It may extend smoke tests
Performance Performance qualification
VNF Test cases related to deploy an open source VNF including an orchestrator
Stress Stress and robustness tests
In Service In service testing

Testing domains

The domains deal with the technical scope of the tests. It shall correspond to domains defined for the certification program:

  • compute
  • network
  • storage
  • hypervisor
  • container
  • vim
  • mano
  • vnf
  • ...

Testing coverage

One of the goals of the testing working group is to identify the poorly covered areas and avoid testing overlap. Ideally based on the declaration of the test cases, through the tags, domains and tier fields, it shall be possible to create heuristic maps.

Reliability, Stress and Long Duration Testing

Resiliency of NFV refers to the ability of the NFV framework to limit disruption and return to normal or at a minimum acceptable service delivery level in the face of a fault, failure, or an event that disrupts the normal operation [DEV5].

Reliability testing evaluates the ability of SUT to recover in face of fault, failure or disrupts in normal operation or simply the ability of SUT absorbing “disruptions”.

Reliability tests use different forms of faults as stimulus, and the test must measure the reaction in terms of the outage time or impairments to transmission.

Stress testing involves producing excess load as stimulus, and the test must measure the reaction in terms of unexpected outages or (more likely) impairments to transmission.

These kinds of “load” will cause “disruption” which could be easily found in system logs. It is the purpose to raise such “load” to evaluate the SUT if it could provide an acceptable level of service or level of confidence during such circumstances. In Danube and Euphrates, we only considered the stress test with excess load over OPNFV Platform.

In Danube, Bottlenecks and Yardstick project jointly implemented 2 stress tests (concurrently create/destroy VM pairs and do ping, system throughput limit) while Bottlenecks acts as the load manager calling yardstick to execute each test iteration. These tests are designed to test for breaking points and provide level of confidence of the system to users. Summary of the test cases are listed in the following addresses:

Stress test cases for OPNFV Euphrates (OS Ocata) release can be seen as extension/enhancement of those in D release. These tests are located in Bottlenecks/Yardstick repo (Bottlenecks as load manager while Yardstick execute each test iteration):

network usage from different VM pairs): https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/DEV/Intern+Project%3A+Baseline+Stress+Test+Case+for+Bottlenecks+E+Release

In OPNFV E release, we also plan to do long duration testing over OS Ocata. A separate CI pipe testing OPNFV XCI (OSA) is proposed to accomplish the job. We have applied specific pod for the testing. Proposals and details are listed below:

The long duration testing is supposed to be started when OPNFV E release is published. A simple monitoring module for these tests is also planned to be added: https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/DEV/Intern+Project%3A+Monitoring+Stress+Testing+for+Bottlenecks+E+Release

How TOs

Where can I find information on the different test projects?

On http://docs.opnfv.org! A section is dedicated to the testing projects. You will find the overview of the ecosystem and the links to the project documents.

Another source is the testing wiki on https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/testing

You may also contact the testing group on the IRC channel #opnfv-testperf or by mail at test-wg AT lists.opnfv.org (testing group) or opnfv-tech-discuss AT lists.opnfv.org (generic technical discussions).

How can I contribute to a test project?

As any project, the best solution is to contact the project. The project members with their email address can be found under https://git.opnfv.org/<project>/tree/INFO

You may also send a mail to the testing mailing list or use the IRC channel #opnfv-testperf

Where can I find hardware resources?

You should discuss this topic with the project you are working with. If you need access to an OPNFV community POD, it is possible to contact the infrastructure group. Depending on your needs (scenario/installer/tooling), it should be possible to find free time slots on one OPNFV community POD from the Pharos federation. Create a JIRA ticket to describe your needs on https://jira.opnfv.org/projects/INFRA. You must already be an OPNFV contributor. See https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/DEV/Developer+Getting+Started.

Please note that lots of projects have their own “how to contribute” or “get started” page on the OPNFV wiki.

How do I integrate my tests in CI?

It shall be discussed directly with the project you are working with. It is done through jenkins jobs calling testing project files but the way to onboard cases differ from one project to another.

How to declare my tests in the test Database?

If you have access to the test API swagger (access granted to contributors), you may use the swagger interface of the test API to declare your project. The URL is http://testresults.opnfv.org/test/swagger/spec.html.

Testing Group Test API swagger

Click on Spec, the list of available methods must be displayed.

Testing Group Test API swagger

For the declaration of a new project use the POST /api/v1/projects method. For the declaration of new test cases in an existing project, use the POST

/api/v1/projects/{project_name}/cases method

Testing group declare new test case

How to push your results into the Test Database?

The test database is used to collect test results. By default it is enabled only for CI tests from Production CI pods.

Please note that it is possible to create your own local database.

A dedicated database is for instance created for each plugfest.

The architecture and associated API is described in previous chapter. If you want to push your results from CI, you just have to call the API at the end of your script.

You can also reuse a python function defined in functest_utils.py [DEV2]

Where can I find the documentation on the test API?

The Test API is now documented in this document (see sections above). You may also find autogenerated documentation in http://artifacts.opnfv.org/releng/docs/testapi.html A web protal is also under construction for certification at http://testresults.opnfv.org/test/#/

I have tests, to which category should I declare them?

See table above.

The main ambiguity could be between features and VNF. In fact sometimes you have to spawn VMs to demonstrate the capabilities of the feature you introduced. We recommend to declare your test in the feature category.

VNF category is really dedicated to test including:

  • creation of resources
  • deployement of an orchestrator/VNFM
  • deployment of the VNF
  • test of the VNFM
  • free resources

The goal is not to study a particular feature on the infrastructure but to have a whole end to end test of a VNF automatically deployed in CI. Moreover VNF are run in weekly jobs (one a week), feature tests are in daily jobs and use to get a scenario score.

Where are the logs of CI runs?

Logs and configuration files can be pushed to artifact server from the CI under http://artifacts.opnfv.org/<project name>

References

[DEV1]: OPNFV Testing Ecosystem

[DEV2]: Python code sample to push results into the Database

[DEV3]: Testing group wiki page

[DEV4]: Conversation with the testing community, OPNFV Beijing Summit

[DEV5]: GS NFV 003

IRC support chan: #opnfv-testperf