50.0 A Dog’s Will

The Avocado team is proud to present another release: Avocado version 50.0, aka, “A Dog’s Will” now available!

Release documentation: Avocado 50.0

The major changes introduced on this version are listed below, roughly categorized into major topics and intended audience:

Users/Test Writers

  • Avocado now supports resuming jobs that were interrupted. This means that a system crash, or even an intentional interruption, won’t prevent you from continuing the execution of a job. To use this feature, provide --replay-resume on the Avocado execution that proceeds the crash or interruption.

  • The docstring directives that Avocado uses to allow for test categorization was previously limited to a class docstring. Now, individual test methods can also have their own tags, while also respecting the ones at the class level. The documentation has been updated with an example.

  • The HTML report now presents the test ID and variant ID in separate columns, allowing users to also sort and filter results based on those specific fields.

  • The HTML report will now show the test parameters used in a test when the user hovers the cursor over the test name.

  • Avocado now reports the total job execution time on the UI, instead of just the tests execution time. This may affect users that are looking for the TESTS TIME: line, and reinforce that machine readable formats such as JSON and XUnit are more dependable than the UI intended for humans.

  • The avocado.core.plugin_interfaces.JobPre is now properly called before avocado.core.job.Job.run(), and accordingly avocado.core.plugin_interfaces.JobPost is called after it. Some plugins which depended on the previous behavior can use the avocado.core.plugin_interfaces.JobPreTests and avocado.core.plugin_interfaces.JobPostTests for a similar behavior. As a example on how to write plugin code that works properly this Avocado version, as well as on previous versions, take a look at this accompanying Avocado-VT plugin commit.

  • The Avocado multiplex command has been renamed to variants. Users of avocado multiplex will notice a deprecation message, and are urged to switch to the new command. The command line options and behavior of the variants command is identical to the multiplex one.

  • The number of variants produced with the multiplex command (now variants) was missing in the previous version. It’s now been restored.

Internal Changes

  • Avocado’s own internal tests now can be given different level marks, and will run a different level on different environments. The idea is to increase coverage without having false positives on more restricted environments.

  • The test_tests_tmp_dir selftests that was previously disable due to failure on our CI environment was put back to be executed.

  • The amount of the test runner will wait for the test process exit status has received tweaks and is now better documented (see avocado.core.runner.TIMEOUT_TEST_INTERRUPTED, avocado.core.runner.TIMEOUT_PROCESS_DIED and avocado.core.runner.TIMEOUT_PROCESS_ALIVE).

  • Some cleanups and refactors were made to how the SKIP and CANCEL test statuses are implemented.

For more information, please check out the complete Avocado changelog.

Release Meeting

The Avocado release meetings are now open to the community via Hangouts on Air. The meetings are recorded and made available on the Avocado Test Framework YouTube channel.

For this release, you can watch the meeting on this link.

Sprint theme: https://trello.com/c/FleklxHi/1016-sprint-theme-a-dog-s-will-2000