Pelias Fuzzy Tester

This is the Pelias fuzzy tester library, used for running our acceptance-tests and fuzzy-tests.

What are fuzzy tests? See the original problem statement that lead to the creation of this library.

Most importantly, fuzzy tests deliver more than just a single bit of pass or fail for each test: they specify a total number of points (a score) for the test, and return how many points out of the maximum were achieved. The weighting of individual parts of the test can be adjusted.

Note: fuzzy-tester requires NPM version 2 or greater. The NPM team recommends you update NPM using NPM itself with sudo npm install -g npm.

Usage

// in the root directory of the repo containing the tests
fuzzy-tester
fuzzy-tester --help
fuzzy-tester -e prod
fuzzy-tester -t dev

Test Case Files

Test-cases are expected to live in test_cases/, and are split into test suites in individual JSON files. Each file must contain the following properties:

• name is the suite title displayed when executing.
• priorityThresh indicates the expected result must be found within the top N locations. This can be set for the entire suite as well as overwritten in individual test cases.
• distanceThresh (optional) defines the accepted maximal distance (in meters) between search result coordinates and the coordinates defined in each test. Each test case can include a specific threshold value. This makes sense because location of a neigborhood is not as accurately defined as location of, say, a building. Default threshold is 500 meters.
• tests is an array of test cases that make up the suite.
• endpoint the API endpoint (search, reverse, suggest) to target. Defaults to search.
• weights (optional) test suite wide weighting for scores of the individual expectations. See the weights section below

tests consists of objects with the following properties:

• id is a unique identifier within the test suite (this could be unnecessary, let's discuss)

• type is simply a category to group the test under, to allowing running select groups of tests rather than all of them.

• status is the optional expected status of this test-case (whether it should pass/fail/etc.), and will be used to identify improvements and regressions. May be either of pass or fail.

• user is the name of the person that added the test case.

• endpoint the API endpoint (search, reverse, suggest) to target. Defaults to search, which will override the endpoint specified by the test-suite.

• in contains the API parameters that will be urlencoded and appended to the API url.

• expected contains expected results. The object can contain a priorityThresh property, which will override the priorityThresh specified by the test-suite, and must contain a properties property. properties is mapped to an array of either of:

  • object: all of the key-value pairs will be tested against the objects returned by the API for exact matches.
  • string: a matching object will be looked up in the locations.json file. Allows you to easily reuse the same object for multiple test-cases.

  If properties is null, the test-case is assumed to be a placeholder.

  expected can also contain a test specific distanceThresh value, and an array of [lon, lat] coordinates. With these coordinates, it is possible to compare distance between locations found in the search and expected locations. This is often useful, because matching the name labels may fail even when the geocoder has found a proper result ('Harvard' != 'Harvard University'). Location coordinates are less ambiguous.

  Coordinate based tests also help to track invalid location data in the search database.

• unexpected is analogous to expected, except that you cannot specify a priorityThresh and the properties array does not support strings.

• weights (optional) test case specific weighting for scores of the individual expectations. See the weights section below

Import Scripts for Test Cases

The scripts folder contains example scripts for creating fuzzy tests. For example, the data import script scripts/importHSLpoi.js can be used to create a fuzzy test from a poi data list as follows:

• Edit the import script scripts/importHSLPoi.js to specify which poi attributes and search attributes will be compared in the test. The current defaults serve as a good starting point.
• Run the command node scripts/importHSLPoi.js data/poi.txt, where poi.txt is the source data file.
• The script creates a test file called HslPoitest.json. You may edit it to fine tune the test setup. For example, you can change the threshold values afterwards, or add subtest specific thresholds.
• Move the test file to the testing environment ../fuzzy-tests/test_cases and run the test there. For more information, check fuzzy-tests.

Output Generators

The acceptance-tests support multiple different output generators, like an email and terminal output. See node test --help for details on how to specify a generator besides the default. Note that the email generator requires an AWS account, and that your pelias-config file contain the following configuration:

{
	"acceptance-tests": {
		"email": {
			"ses": {
				"accessKeyId": "AWSACCESSKEY",
				"secretAccessKey": "AWS/Secret/key",
			},
			"recipients": ["[email protected]", "[email protected]"], // the list of recipients
		}
	}
}

Autocomplete mode

A special output generator, -o autocomplete not only changes the output, but changes the behaviour of the test suite. Instead of running each test case exactly as defined, it will run many tests for each test case. The tests will be run against the autocomplete endpoint and will correspond to successively longer substrings of the input text, similar to how a user would type the text into autocomplete. It looks like this:

The results are shown underneath the input text, with each character corresponding to the result of the autocomplete query with the input text up to the character above entered. Tests that pass are green, tests that fail are red. If the expected output was not found at all, the result character will be an F, if the expected output was found, the character will be the zero indexed location in the API results where it was found.

To the right of the input text, some additional info might be displayed. The first is any additional parameters being sent with the API call, like a location bias. The second is a count of the number of expectations included in the test case. This helps detect situations where one expectation is found, but the other isn't (the result might be a confusing red 0 in that case).

API URL aliases

The acceptance-tests runner recognizes a number of aliases for Pelias API URLs (eg, stage corresponds to pelias.stage.mapzen.com), which can be specified as command-line arguments when running a test suite. You can override the default aliases and define your own in pelias-config:

{
	"acceptance-tests": {
		"endpoints": {
			"alias": "http://my.pelias.instance"
		}
	}
}

Weights

Weights are used to influence the score each individual expectation contributes to the total score for a test. By default, all fields in expected properties, passing the priority threshold, and the absence of any unexpected properties each contribute one point.

Any score for any individual property can be changed by specifying an object weights in a test suite, or in an individual test case. For example, to more heavily weight the name property by giving it a weight of 10 points, set weights to the following:

{
  "properties": {
    "name": 10
  }
}

Weights can be nested and are completely optional, in which case the defaults will be in effect.