Handling of Skipped Tests in Helix framework #7286
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Use the Helix testing orchestration framework to run our Terminal LocalTests and Console Host UIA tests. ## References #### Creates the following new issues: - #7281 - re-enable local tests that were disabled to turn on Helix - #7282 - re-enable UIA tests that were disabled to turn on Helix - #7286 - investigate and implement appropriate compromise solution to how Skipped is handled by MUX Helix scripts #### Consumes from: - #7164 - The update to TAEF includes wttlog.dll. The WTT logs are what MUX's Helix scripts use to track the run state, convert to XUnit format, and notify both Helix and AzDO of what's going on. #### Produces for: - #671 - Making Terminal UIA tests is now possible - #6963 - MUX's Helix scripts are already ready to capture PGO data on the Helix machines as certain tests run. Presuming we can author some reasonable scenarios, turning on the Helix environment gets us a good way toward automated PGO. #### Related: - #4490 - We lost the AzDO integration of our test data when I moved from the TAEF/VSTest adapter directly back to TE. Thanks to the WTTLog + Helix conversion scripts to XUnit + new upload phase, we have it back! ## PR Checklist * [x] Closes #3838 * [x] I work here. * [x] Literally adds tests. * [ ] Should I update a testing doc in this repo? * [x] Am core contributor. Hear me roar. * [ ] Correct spell-checking the right way before merge. ## Detailed Description of the Pull Request / Additional comments We have had two classes of tests that don't work in our usual build-machine testing environment: 1. Tests that require interactive UI automation or input injection (a.k.a. require a logged in user) 2. Tests that require the entire Windows Terminal to stand up (because our Xaml Islands dependency requires 1903 or later and the Windows Server instance for the build is based on 1809.) The Helix testing environment solves both of these and is brought to us by our friends over in https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml. This PR takes a large portion of scripts and pipeline configuration steps from the Microsoft-UI-XAML repository and adjusts them for Terminal needs. You can see the source of most of the files in either https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/tree/master/build/Helix or https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/tree/master/build/AzurePipelinesTemplates Some of the modifications in the files include (but are not limited to) reasons like: - Our test binaries are named differently than MUX's test binaries - We don't need certain types of testing that MUX does. - We use C++ and C# tests while MUX was using only C# tests (so the naming pattern and some of the parsing of those names is different e.g. :: separators in C++ and . separators in C#) - Our pipeline phases work a bit differently than MUX and/or we need significantly fewer pieces to the testing matrix (like we don't test a wide variety of OS versions). The build now runs in a few stages: 1. The usual build and run of unit tests/feature tests, packaging verification, and whatnot. This phase now also picks up and packs anything required for running tests in Helix into an artifact. (It also unifies the artifact name between the things Helix needs and the existing build outputs into the single `drop` artifact to make life a little easier.) 2. The Helix preparation build runs that picks up those artifacts, generates all the scripts required for Helix to understand the test modules/functions from our existing TAEF tests, packs it all up, and queues it on the Helix pool. 3. Helix generates a VM for our testing environment and runs all the TAEF tests that require it. The orchestrator at helix.dot.net watches over this and tracks the success/fail and progress of each module and function. The scripts from our MUX friends handle installing dependencies, making the system quiet for better reliability, detecting flaky tests and rerunning them, and coordinating all the log uploads (including for the subruns of tests that are re-run.) 4. A final build phase is run to look through the results with the Helix API and clean up the marking of tests that are flaky, link all the screenshots and console output logs into the AzDO tests panel, and other such niceities. We are set to run Helix tests on the Feature test policy of only x64 for now. Additionally, because the set up of the Helix VMs takes so long, we are *NOT* running these in PR trigger right now as I believe we all very much value our 15ish minute PR turnaround (and the VM takes another 15 minutes to just get going for whatever reason.) For now, they will only run as a rolling build on master after PRs are merged. We should still know when there's an issue within about an hour of something merging and multiple PRs merging fast will be done on the rolling build as a batch run (not one per). In addition to setting up the entire Helix testing pipeline for the tests that require it, I've preserved our classic way of running unit and feature tests (that don't require an elaborate environment) directly on the build machines. But with one bonus feature... They now use some of the scripts from MUX to transform their log data and report it to AzDO so it shows up beautifully in the build report. (We used to have this before I removed the MStest/VStest wrapper for performance reasons, but now we can have reporting AND performance!) See https://dev.azure.com/ms/terminal/_build/results?buildId=101654&view=ms.vss-test-web.build-test-results-tab for an example. I explored running all of the tests on Helix but.... the Helix setup time is long and the resources are more expensive. I felt it was better to preserve the "quick signal" by continuing to run these directly on the build machine (and skipping the more expensive/slow Helix setup if they fail.) It also works well with the split between PR builds not running Helix and the rolling build running Helix. PR builds will get a good chunk of tests for a quick turn around and the rolling build will finish the more thorough job a bit more slowly. ## Validation Steps Performed - [x] Ran the updated pipelines with Pull Request configuration ensuring that Helix tests don't run in the usual CI - [x] Ran with simulation of the rolling build to ensure that the tests now running in Helix will pass. All failures marked for follow on in reference issues.
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Oh hey look at that, Niksa knew this was a problem. I think I did this back in #15831, more or less. We don't do any of the XAML retrying, but we also do report these as skipped now. |
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We have been using the Skipped state for two situations in our code:
Unfortunately, with the adoption of the Helix scripts from Microsoft-UI-XAML, this isn't fully compatible.
This is because the Helix scripts, when run on the Helix machines, have some retry logic in them. They take anything that is NOT a pass and they re-run it up to 10 times. They store all the subresults and bucket tests into 3 categories:
Then in the final post-processing steps for test results, things that are Skipped are evaluated for the pass/fail threshold and converted to either Pass or Fail based on whether they indicated "Pass" above or below the threshold count.
This makes our usage of Skipped do the following:
So in summary, the scripts right now only understand two things: Pass and Fail. Also they reuse Skipped as an intermediate counter state only to further evaluate it into Pass/Fail later.
That doesn't work for us.
To complete the PR where I brought Helix online, I used the TestAttribute "Ignore" to "True" instead on tests that need to be disabled temporarily for some reason. I did this only on the UIA/LocalTests because they're the only ones affected by running inside Helix with the retry scripts. The Unit/Feature tests that run on the build machine (and use a small subset of the scripts just to report their test results to AzDO) are fine reporting Skipped as they are.
On talking with the Microsoft UI XAML team, for handling tests that dynamically decide they're OK, they instead chose to report "Pass" and exit early as necessary.
Overall, I think this is what we need to do going forward:
te.execommand-line argument/runIgnoredTeststo be used to run them when attempting to fix them up.)The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: