upskill-event-manager/wordpress-dev/DEPLOYMENT-RESILIENCE.md

Deployment and Testing Resilience Guide

This document outlines strategies and tools to make the HVAC Community Events plugin testing and deployment more resilient to changes and failures.

Resilience Strategies

1. Automated Selector Verification

• Use the verify-selectors.sh script before each deployment to detect UI changes that could break tests.
• Run selector validation as part of CI/CD pipeline to prevent broken deployments.
• Create specific debug scripts for each critical page to easily identify selector changes.

# Run selector verification before deployment
./bin/verify-selectors.sh

# Run with auto-fix option to generate debug tests
./bin/verify-selectors.sh --fix

# Run in CI mode to fail the build on selector issues
./bin/verify-selectors.sh --ci

2. Pre-Deployment Validation

• Implement comprehensive pre-deployment checks with pre-deploy-validation.sh.
• Validate environment, plugin activation, test users, and critical functionality.
• Create deployment gates that prevent releases if validation fails.

# Run pre-deployment validation
./bin/pre-deploy-validation.sh

# Run in CI mode to fail the build on validation issues
./bin/pre-deploy-validation.sh --ci

3. Resilient Selectors

• Use attribute-based selectors instead of ID-based selectors.
• Implement multiple selector strategies with fallbacks.
• Add robust error detection with multiple approaches.
• Regularly validate and update selectors based on actual UI structure.

Example of resilient selector implementation:

// Instead of:
private readonly usernameInput = '#user_login';

// Use:
private readonly usernameInput = 'input[name="log"], input[type="text"][id="user_login"], input.username';

4. Progressive Deployment

• Implement canary deployments to test changes on a subset of users.
• Create automated rollback mechanisms based on test results.
• Set up a staging-to-production promotion process with multiple validation steps.

Recommended deployment flow:

1. Deploy to staging and run full test suite
2. Run pre-deployment validation on production environment
3. Deploy to 10% of production servers
4. Run critical path tests on canary deployment
5. If successful, deploy to remaining servers
6. If tests fail, automatically roll back to previous version

5. Test Data Management

• Enhance test data scripts to ensure consistency.
• Create isolated test users for different test suites.
• Implement cleanup procedures to prevent test data pollution.
• Add data verification steps to ensure test preconditions are met.

Test data management scripts:

# Create test users for specific test suite
./bin/create-test-users.sh --suite=certificate-tests

# Cleanup test data after test runs
./bin/cleanup-test-data.sh

# Verify test data exists and is in expected state
./bin/verify-test-data.sh

6. Monitoring and Alerting

• Add comprehensive logging to tests and scripts.
• Implement test result dashboards with historical trends.
• Set up alerts for test failures and critical selector changes.
• Monitor test execution times to detect performance degradation.

Monitoring implementation:

1. Store test results in a structured format (JSON/CSV)
2. Track test execution times over time
3. Set up alerts for:
   • Failing tests
   • Increased test execution time
   • Selector changes
   • Plugin activation failures

7. Documentation and Knowledge Sharing

• Keep testing documentation up to date with latest best practices.
• Document common issues and solutions in a centralized location.
• Create a selector management system with version control.
• Maintain a database of UI components and their selectors.

Documentation structure:

• TESTING.md: General testing guidelines
• TESTING-STRATEGY.md: Detailed testing strategy
• DEPLOYMENT-RESILIENCE.md: This document
• TROUBLESHOOTING.md: Common issues and solutions
• SELECTORS.md: Database of UI components and selectors

8. Recovery Procedures

• Create automated recovery scripts for common failures.
• Implement health check endpoints for services.
• Add self-healing capabilities to critical components.
• Document manual recovery procedures for complex failures.

Recovery scripts:

# Reset plugin state in case of activation issues
./bin/reset-plugin-state.sh

# Recover from database corruption
./bin/recover-database.sh

# Restore test data from backup
./bin/restore-test-data.sh

Implementation Plan

To implement these resilience strategies, follow this phased approach:

Phase 1: Immediate Improvements (1-2 weeks)

1. Update selectors in all page objects to use resilient patterns
2. Implement and use the selector verification script
3. Create basic pre-deployment validation script
4. Update documentation with best practices

Phase 2: Enhanced Resilience (2-4 weeks)

1. Implement test data management scripts
2. Create monitoring dashboards for test results
3. Set up basic alerting for test failures
4. Develop recovery scripts for common failures

Phase 3: Advanced Resilience (4-8 weeks)

1. Implement canary deployment process
2. Create automated rollback mechanisms
3. Set up comprehensive monitoring and alerting
4. Develop self-healing capabilities for critical components

Conclusion

By implementing these resilience strategies, we can significantly improve the reliability of our testing and deployment processes, reduce the impact of failures, and ensure a more stable and consistent user experience.