How to QA

Why QA something?

We’ve found that almost every time we do Quality Assurance on something, we find something that would have been confusing/annoying to our users. Hence it’s worth doing QA for everything.

There are very few excpetions to this rule.

What does good QA look like?

• You understand what has changed
• You understand why that change was made, so you have context

• You understand which parts of the system could be affected

  • For example, if a change is made to the way a button on the login form works, that might also appear in the /setup page, so you should check what happens.

• You should have a high standard -- but be flexible.

  • We want to build the best possible product. In terms of priority (most important first), the following should be true about a new feature:

    • It works.
    • It is obvious how it works.
    • It doesn't have weird glitches or bugs.
    • It doesn’t cause bugs elsewhere.

Setting up Heroku Test Environment

1. Go to the pull request you want to QA on.

2. Go to the Heroku test environment. Check/do the following:

   1. If the environment was already deployed, it should say "This branch was successfully deployed"
   2. If it says ‘This branch was not deployed’ go to the Heroku pipeline and click ‘Create review app’
   3. If the PR was submitted from a fork, you'll need to test the changes locally.
3. Open the app, create a new account, and start testing!

Hacking the Test Environment

Testing User Properties

To test user properties

1. Go to /demo
2. Open your developer console - On MacOS:  command ⌘  +  option ⌥  +  I 
3. Paste posthog.identify('random-user-id');
4. Paste posthog.people.set({email: 'jane@gmail.com'});
5. You can now go to /people and see that the user has an email set
6. You can pass any other property in the .set function

Setting up a Fork of the Production Database

Sometimes you want to test against production data, but you have to run migrations. Obviously we can't do this against the production database, so we need to create a fork.

First run:

heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:standard-0 --fork HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_TEAL --fast --app posthog

You can then follow the process by running:

heroku pg:wait -a posthog

Remove the other free database:

heroku addons -a APP_NAME
heroku addons:destroy [free database] -a APP_NAME

Then attach the database to the test app:

heroku addons:attach ADDON_NAME -a APP_NAME

Set DATABASE_URL of the other addon if that's not already done:

heroku config -a APP_NAME
heroku config:set DATABASE_URL=[url] -a APP_NAME