Add additional documentation for stress tests
In order to encourage people to add more and more stress tests we
need more documentation about it. This documents the stresstest
decorator and gives a global overview.
Change-Id: I65294fb278faba7a0d324782bf50e2fdedc5c1de
diff --git a/HACKING.rst b/HACKING.rst
index 7d995c3..377c647 100644
--- a/HACKING.rst
+++ b/HACKING.rst
@@ -163,3 +163,26 @@
- If the execution of a set of tests is required to be serialized then locking
can be used to perform this. See AggregatesAdminTest in
tempest.api.compute.admin for an example of using locking.
+
+Stress Tests in Tempest
+-----------------------
+Any tempest test case can be flagged as a stress test. With this flag it will
+be automatically discovery and used in the stress test runs. The stress test
+framework itself is a facility to spawn and control worker processes in order
+to find race conditions (see ``tempest/stress/`` for more information). Please
+note that these stress tests can't be used for benchmarking purposes since they
+don't measure any performance characteristics.
+
+Example::
+
+ @stresstest(class_setup_per='process')
+ def test_this_and_that(self):
+ ...
+
+This will flag the test ``test_this_and_that`` as a stress test. The parameter
+``class_setup_per`` gives control when the setUpClass function should be called.
+
+Good candidates for stress tests are:
+
+- Scenario tests
+- API tests that have a wide focus