Code Quality testing code-quality-testing

Learn how code quality testing of pipelines works and how it can improve the quality of your deployments.

Introduction introduction

During pipeline execution, the software captures a number of metrics. These metrics are then compared to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) defined by the business owner. Or, they are compared to standards set by Adobe Managed Services.

These results are reported using a three-tiered rating system.

Three-tiered ratings three-tiered-ratings

There are three gates in the pipeline:

For each of these gates, there is a three-tiered structure for issues identified by the gate.

Code Quality testing code-quality-testing-step

This testing step evaluates the quality of your application code, which is the main purpose of a code quality-only pipeline. It is executed immediately following the build step in all non-production and production pipelines. To learn more, go to Configuring Non-Production Pipelines.

Code quality testing scans the source code to ensure that it meets certain quality criteria.

The software implements it using a combination of SonarQube analysis, content package-level examination with OakPAL, and Dispatcher validation with the Dispatcher Optimization Tool.

There are more than 100 rules combining generic Java rules and AEM-specific rules. Some of the AEM-specific rules are created based on best practices from AEM Engineering and are referred to as Custom Code Quality Rules.

The results of code quality testing are delivered as rating as summarized in this table.

Dealing with false positives dealing-with-false-positives

The quality scanning process is not perfect and sometimes incorrectly identifies issues that are not actually problematic. This scenario is known as a false positive.

In these cases, the source code can be annotated with the standard Java @SuppressWarnings annotation specifying the rule ID as the annotation attribute. For example, one common false positive is that the SonarQube rule to detect hardcoded passwords can be aggressive about how a hardcoded password is identified.

The following code is fairly common in an AEM project, which has code to connect to some external service.

@Property(label = "Service Password")
private static final String PROP_SERVICE_PASSWORD = "password";

SonarQube then raises a blocker vulnerability. But after reviewing the code, you recognize that this issue is not a vulnerability and can annotate the code with the appropriate rule ID.

@SuppressWarnings("squid:S2068")
@Property(label = "Service Password")
private static final String PROP_SERVICE_PASSWORD = "password";

However, if the code was actually the following:

@Property(label = "Service Password", value = "mysecretpassword")
private static final String PROP_SERVICE_PASSWORD = "password";

Then the correct solution is to remove the hardcoded password.

Security testing security-testing

Cloud Manager runs the existing AEM Security Heath Checks on the staging environment following deployment and reports the status through the UI. The results are aggregated from all AEM instances in the environment.

These same health checks can be executed at any time through the Web Console or the Operations Dashboard.

If any of the instances reports a failure for a given health check, the entire environment fails that health check. As with code quality and performance testing, these health checks are organized into categories and reported using the three-tiered gating system. The only distinction is that there is no threshold if there is security testing. All the health checks are pass or fail.

The following table lists the health checks.

Performance testing performance-testing

AEM Sites aem-sites

Cloud Manager executes performance testing for AEM Sites programs. The performance test is run for approximately 30 mins by spinning up virtual users (containers) that simulate actual users to access pages in staging environments to simulate traffic. These pages are found using a crawler.

Virtual users virtual-users

Cloud Manager spins up virtual users or containers based on KPIs (response time and pageviews/min) set by the Business Owner role. These KPIs are set while creating or editing the program.

Based on the KPIs defined, up to ten containers that simulate actual users are spun up. The pages that are selected for testing are split and assigned to each virtual user.

Crawler crawler

Prior to the start of the 30 minute test period, Cloud Manager crawls the staging environment using a set of one or more seed URLs configured by the Customer Success Engineer. Starting from these URLs, the HTML of each page is inspected and links are traversed in a breadth-first fashion.

Page sets for testing page-sets

Three page sets select the pages. Cloud Manager uses the access logs from the AEM instances across production and staging environments to determine the following buckets.

Distribution of traffic across page sets selected distribution-of-traffic

You can choose anywhere from one to all three sets on the Testing tab of your pipeline configuration. The distribution of traffic is based on the number of sets selected. That is, if all three are selected, 33% of the total page views are put into each set. If two are selected, 50% goes to each set. If one is selected, 100% of the traffic goes to that set.

Let us consider this example.

Over the 30 minute test period:

Test and report testing-reporting

Cloud Manager executes performance testing for AEM Sites programs by requesting pages as an unauthenticated user by default on the staging publish server for a 30 minute test period. It measures the virtual user-generated metrics (response time, error rate, views per minute, and so on) for each page and various system-level metrics (CPU, memory, networking data) for all instances.

The following table summarizes the performance test matrix using the three-tiered gating system.

See Authenticated performance testing for more details on using basic authentication for performance testing for Sites and Assets.

Authenticated performance testing authenticated-performance-testing

If necessary, AMS customers with authenticated sites can specify a username and password which Cloud Manager uses to access the website during sites performance testing.

The username and password are specified as pipeline variables with the names CM_PERF_TEST_BASIC_USERNAME and CM_PERF_TEST_BASIC_PASSWORD.

The username is stored in a string variable and the password is stored in a secretString variable. If both of these variables are specified, every request from the performance test crawler and the test virtual users contains these credentials as HTTP Basic authentication.

To set these variables using the Cloud Manager CLI, run:

$ aio cloudmanager:set-pipeline-variables <pipeline id> --variable CM_PERF_TEST_BASIC_USERNAME <username> --secret CM_PERF_TEST_BASIC_PASSWORD <password>

See Patch user pipeline variables API documentation to learn how to use the API.

AEM Assets aem-assets

Cloud Manager runs performance testing for AEM Assets programs by repeatedly uploading assets for 30 minutes.

Onboarding requirement onboarding-requirement

For Assets performance testing, your Customer Success Engineer creates a cloudmanager user and password during the onboarding of the author to staging environment. The performance test steps require a user called cloudmanager and the associated password set up by your CSE.

This method should remain in the author instance with its permissions unchanged. Altering or removing it can cause Assets performance testing to fail.

Images and Assets for testing assets-for-testing

Customers can upload their own assets for testing. This process can be done from the Pipeline Setup or Edit screen. Common image formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF and BMP are supported along with Photoshop, Illustrator and Postscript files.

If no images are uploaded, Cloud Manager uses a default image and PDF documents for testing.

Distribution of Assets for testing distribution-of-assets

The distribution of how many assets of each type are uploaded per minute is set in the Pipeline Setup or Edit screen.

For example, if a 70/30 split is used, and there are 10 assets uploaded per minute, 7 images and 3 documents are uploaded per minute.

Test and report testing-and-reporting

Cloud Manager creates a folder on the author instance using the username and password that the CSE setup. Assets are then uploaded to the folder using an open-source library. The tests run by the Assets testing step are written using an open source library. Both processing time for each asset and various system-level metrics are measured across the 30-minute testing duration. This feature can upload both images and PDF documents.

Performance testing results graphs performance-testing-results-graphs

A number of metrics are available in the Performance Test dialog box.

The metric panels can be expanded to display a graph, provide a link to a download, or both.

This functionality is available for the following metrics.

Content package scanning optimization content-package-scanning-optimization

As part of the quality analysis process, Cloud Manager performs analysis of the content packages produced by the Maven build. Cloud Manager offers optimizations to accelerate this process, which is effective when certain packaging constraints are observed.

The key optimization is for projects outputting a single ‘all’ package, containing other content packages produced by the build, which are marked as skipped. When Cloud Manager detects this scenario, rather than unpack the “all” package, the individual content packages are scanned directly and sorted based on dependencies. For example, consider the following build output.

If the only items inside myco-all-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.zip are the two skipped content packages, then the two embedded packages are scanned in lieu of the “all” content package.

For projects that produce dozens of embedded packages, this optimization has been shown to save upwards of 10 minutes per pipeline execution.

A special case can occur when the “all” content package contains a combination of skipped content packages and OSGi bundles. For example, if myco-all-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.zip contained the two embedded packages previously mentioned and one or more OSGi bundles, then a new, minimal content package is constructed with only the OSGi bundles. This package is always named cloudmanager-synthetic-jar-package and the contained bundles are placed in /apps/cloudmanager-synthetic-installer/install.