Betterrev building on Cloudbees

[Daniel Bryant]

Hi all,

Yesterday at an OpenJDK hackday at 'Hack the Tower' [0] Richard and I 
managed to get Betterrev building via Cloudbees (this built upon the 
initial work done here by Mani and Martijn).

Needless to say, no yaks were harmed completing this work, but quite a 
few were shaved... :-)

I'm quite pleased to get this working, as now we can get rid of the 
dreaded 'works for me' type problems we have been seeing (particularly 
around tests). You will however notice that the build is currently still 
failing [1], and this raises some important questions/comments about our 
current approach to testing.

To get the discussion going, here are a few thoughts that Richard, Mani 
and Michael discussed at the event:

  * We should use Akka primarily as a communication/coordination wrapper
    around functional units of code. This builds upon Edward's initial
    suggestion that we should TDD a functional unit of code with unit
    tests (for example, the email functionality), and then add a thin
    Akka-based wrapper around this when complete. The Akka extension to
    the functional unit should only be tested via a system/integration test
  * We should aim to minimise the number of tests that rely on external
    resources, and strive to reduce the non-determinism type issues we
    have seen with polling the hg repos. However, we may need a few
    system tests to ensure that external resources that are scraped or
    polled do not change e.g. to ensure the Bitbucket API does not
    change, or that the Oracle OCA page structure does not change.
  * Should we have an hg code repo as a sub-directory of the project for
    testing? For example, we currently include the jdk8 hg repo in the
    project, but I'm not sure how this will be handled when building
    with Cloudbees? Will they allow execution of arbitrary scripts? And
    how should we script the setup of this repo to ensure we have a
    fully automated build

It would be great to hear people's feedback - I've posted this to both 
the betterrev Google group and adoption-discuss mailing lists, as I know 
some people have issues accessing Google groups at work etc.

Best wishes,

Daniel

[0] http://www.meetup.com/Londonjavacommunity/events/181023842/
[1] https://adopt-openjdk.ci.cloudbees.com/job/betterrev/70/console


-- 
*Daniel Bryant  |  Software Development Consultant  | www.tai-dev.co.uk 
<http://www.tai-dev.co.uk/>*
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