Re: [GSoC 2021 Proposal] Developing Testing Suite for PGWEB

Hi Chirag,

On 4/6/21 11:21 AM, Chirag Kasat wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> I am Chirag Kasat and I am interested in the following project for GSoC
> 2021. I would be grateful if you can have a look and give me suggestions
> to improve.
> This is the link to my draft proposal:
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V2FsPKmWdG8Ng0-p4ID3la_0sYAtYDD8MM1O55b-cCQ/edit?usp=sharing 
> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V2FsPKmWdG8Ng0-p4ID3la_0sYAtYDD8MM1O55b-cCQ/edit?usp=sharing>
> I have also attached the PDF version.

Thank you for putting this proposal together. The overall approach
appears to be reasonable and will certainly help add some more assurance
around the pgweb codebase.

My recommendation would be around the scope of the project. I think it
is conceivable that you could easily spend the entire summer just
focused on the unit test portion of the project based upon both the size
of the codebase and current lack of test automation.

I have familiarity with Selenium as far back as when I was doing my own
summer college projects -- I know a lot has changed since then, but I
have often found that the cost of upkeeping a Selenium stack can often
outweigh the benefits. However, this was typically in a rapidly changing
environment -- the frontend of pgweb does not change all that often.

I don't know if we really need performance testing at this point in time
based on our traffic pattern and usage of varnish. It could certainly be
interesting to see, and may help identify a few areas we could optimize,
but I would certainly rank it below unit testing.

Accessibility testing would be very much welcome. Even having some
design guidelines on what we could do better on that front would be a
huge next step.

So in other words, my recommendations would be to focus on building up a
core set of unit tests along with a focus on how we can improve our
overall accessibility.

This is just one person's opinion, but I hope it provides a good
starting point on what to look at.

Thanks!

Jonathan