STAMP, the end

Last modified by Vincent Massol on 2020/02/18 15:42

Feb 18 2020

The STAMP research project has been a boon for the XWiki open source project. It has allowed the project to gain a lot in terms of quality. There have been lots of areas of improvements but the main domains that have substantially benefited the quality are:

  • Increase of the test coverage. At the start of STAMP the XWiki project already had a substantial automated suite of tests covering 65.29% of the whole case base. Not only the project was able to increase it to over 71.4% (a major achievement for a large code base of 500K NCLOC such as XWiki) but also improve the quality of these tests themselves thanks to increasing the mutation score for them by using PIT/Descartes.
    • XWiki’s build and CI now fail when either coverage or mutation score are reduced
  • Addition of configuration testing. At the start of STAMP the XWiki project was only testing automatically a single configuration (latest HSQLDB + latest Jetty + latest Firefox). From time to time some testers were doing manual tests on different configurations but this was a very intensive process and very random and ad hoc. We were having a substantial number of issues raised in the XWiki issue tracker about configuration-related bugs. Thanks to STAMP the XWiki project has been able to cover all the configurations it supports and to execute its functional UI tests on all of them (every day, every week and every month based on different criteria). This is leading to a huge improvement in quality and in developer's productivity since developers don't need to manually setup multiple environments on their machine to test their new code (that was very time-consuming and difficult when onboarding new developers).

XWiki has spread its own engineering practices to the other STAMP project members and has benefitted from the interactions with the students, researchers and project members to accrue and firm up its own practices.

Last but not least, the STAMP research project has allowed the XWiki project to get time to work on testing in general, on its CI/CD pipeline, on adding new distribution packagings (such as the new Docker-based distribution which has increased XWiki's Active Installs) which were prerequisites for STAMP-developed tools, but which have tremendous benefits by themselves even outside of pure testing. Globally, this has raised the bar for the project, placing it even higher in the category of projects with a strong engineering practice with controlled quality. The net result is a better and more stable product with an increased development productivity. Globally STAMP has allowed a European software editor (XWiki SAS) and open source software (XWiki) to match and possibly even surpass non-European (American, etc) software editors in terms of engineering practices.

So while it's the end of STAMP, its results continue to live on inside the XWiki project.

I'm personally very happy to have been part of STAMP and I have learnt a lot about the topics at hand but also about European research projects (it was my first project).

Tags: STAMP
Created by Vincent Massol on 2020/02/18 15:42