Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

[docs] Add comment about ftr test environment differences #169596

Merged
merged 3 commits into from
Oct 24, 2023
Merged
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
2 changes: 2 additions & 0 deletions dev_docs/operations/writing_stable_functional_tests.mdx
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -10,6 +10,8 @@ Consistently writing functional tests that aren't flaky is impossible. There are

When you watch tests execute locally it can be tempting to think "after I click this button I can click this other button" but this assumes that the first button click will always execute its click handler immediately, or that the render of the second button will be done immediately. The reality is that user interfaces are super complex and these types of assumptions are by far the most common cause of flakiness in tests.

We also have to remember that we can't assume a test passing locally will mean it will pass in CI. The two environments are different. There is a lot we could mention, but at a high level, most functional tests are run on 4 core 16 GB machines, and these machines are virtualized, which means neighbors can cause modest but variable levels of performance. Additionally, end-to-end tests in CI are run against {kib} distributions, using default memory configurations, while we run the tests under the `--dev` flag locally with, most likely, a different memory configuration.

There are all sorts of things that can happen to delay a click handler, or react render, and we need to be prepared for those in our tests. We can do this using appropriate timeouts for specific actions, retry logic, and validating our assumptions with code.

## Become familiar with the retry/timing logic of each common service method
Expand Down
Loading