Quality gates in pull requests
Engineering Metrics
Oct 19, 2023
In the dynamic world of software engineering, maintaining the highest standards of code quality is paramount. As engineering teams work tirelessly to churn out new features and optimize existing ones, the importance of quality checks cannot be overstated. These checks, often referred to as 'quality gates', play a pivotal role in ensuring that the code meets the desired standards before it's merged. Let's delve deeper into the world of quality gates and understand their significance in the development process.
What are Quality Gates?
In the realm of software development, quality gates act as checkpoints in the development process, especially during pull requests. They ensure that the code meets specific criteria before it's merged into the main branch. These criteria can range from code coverage percentages, adherence to coding standards, to the absence of critical bugs. By implementing quality gates, engineering teams can uphold the integrity and quality of the codebase.
Types of Quality Gates in Pull Requests
Code Review: One of the most fundamental quality gates, code review involves team members meticulously reviewing the code for any potential issues, ensuring adherence to coding standards, and providing feedback for improvement. It fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing among team members.
Code Coverage: This metric measures the percentage of code that's tested by automated tests. A higher code coverage percentage indicates that more of the codebase is tested, reducing the chances of undetected bugs. Tools like BuildPulse Code Coverage offer granular code coverage, enabling teams to pinpoint areas that need more testing.
Static Code Analysis: This involves analyzing the code without executing it. It helps in identifying potential vulnerabilities, code smells, and areas that don't adhere to coding standards.
Performance Benchmarks: Especially crucial for applications where performance is key, this quality gate ensures that the new code doesn't degrade the application's performance. It checks against predefined benchmarks to ensure optimal performance.
Dependency Checks: With the increasing reliance on third-party libraries and frameworks, it's essential to ensure that these dependencies don't introduce vulnerabilities. This quality gate checks for outdated or vulnerable dependencies.
Integration Tests: These tests ensure that the new code integrates well with the existing codebase and doesn't introduce any unforeseen issues.
The Role of BuildPulse in Upholding Quality
BuildPulse Engineering Metrics plays a pivotal role in upholding code quality. Apart from offering granular code coverage, it acts as a developer copilot, notifying the engineering team about stale pull requests and automating the review process. By leveraging such tools, engineering teams can ensure that their code remains of the highest quality, and any potential issues are promptly addressed.
Why Quality Gates Matter
For an engineering organization, quality gates are not just tools; they are the pillars of the software development process. They ensure:
Consistency: By adhering to predefined standards, the codebase remains consistent, making it easier for team members to collaborate.
Efficiency: Quality gates streamline the development process by catching issues early, reducing the cycle time, and minimizing downtime.
Stakeholder Satisfaction: Delivering high-quality software ensures customer satisfaction and aligns with business goals.
Continuous Improvement: By identifying areas of improvement, quality gates pave the way for continuous optimization and refinement of the codebase.
In Conclusion
In the intricate world of software engineering, upholding quality is not just a goal; it's a continuous journey. Quality gates act as the guardians of this journey, ensuring that the code not only functions as intended but also stands the test of time. By leveraging the right metrics, tools, and processes, engineering teams can navigate the challenges of software development with confidence and precision, ensuring that their projects are always on time and meet the desired timeframe for delivery.
FAQ
What is the difference between a flaky test and a false positive?
A false positive is a test failure in your test suite due to an actual error in the code being executed, or a mismatch in what the test expects from the code.
A flaky test is when you have conflicting test results for the same code. For example, while running tests if you see that a test fails and passes, but the code hasn’t changed, then it’s a flaky test. There’s many causes of flakiness.
What is an example of a flaky test?
An example can be seen in growing test suites - when pull request builds fail for changes you haven’t made. Put differently, when you see a test pass and fail without any code change. These failed tests are flaky tests.
What are common causes of flakiness?
Broken assumptions in test automation and development process can introduce flaky tests - for example, if test data is shared between different tests whether asynchronous, high concurrency, or sequential, the results of one test can affect another.
Poorly written test code can also be a factor. Improper polling, race conditions, improper event dependency handling, shared test data, or timeout handling for network requests or page loads. Any of these can lead to flaky test failures and test flakiness.
End-to-end tests that rely on internal API uptime can cause test flakiness and test failures.
What's the impact of flaky tests?
Flaky tests can wreck havoc on the development process - from wasted developer time from test retries, to creating bugs and product instability and missed releases, time-consuming flaky tests can grind your development process to a halt.
What is the best way to resolve or fix flaky tests?
Devops, software engineering, and software development teams will often need to compare code changes, logs, and other context across test environments from before the test instability started, and after - adding retries or reruns can also help with debugging. Test detection and test execution tooling can help automate this process as well.
BuildPulse enables you to find, assess impact metrics, quarantine, and fix flaky tests.
What are some strategies for preventing flaky tests?
Paying attention and prioritizing flaky tests as they come up can be a good way to prevent them from becoming an issue. This is where a testing culture is important - if a flaky test case is spotted by an engineer, it should be logged right away. This, however, takes a certain level of hygiene - BuildPulse can provide monitoring so flaky tests are caught right away.
What type of tests have flaky tests?
Flaky tests can be seen across the testing process - unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, UI tests, acceptance tests.
What if I don't have that many flaky tests?
Flaky tests can be stealthy - often ignored by engineers and test runs are retried, they build up until they can’t be ignored anymore. These automated tests slow down developer productivity, impact functionality, and reduce confidence in test results and test suites. Better to get ahead while it’s easy and invest in test management.
It’s also important to prevent regressions to catch flakiness early while it’s manageable.
What languages and continuous integration providers does BuildPulse work with?
BuildPulse integrates with all continuous integration providers (including GitHub Actions, BitBucket Pipelines, and more), test frameworks, and workflows.
Combat non-determinism, drive test confidence, and provide the best experience you can to your developers!
How long does implementation/integration with BuildPulse take?
Implementation/integration takes 5 minutes!