Following up on my PIFT 6.x-2.7 Released post, I'd like to take a moment to walk you through another new feature which was introduced with the rollout of the new code.

But before I do, a public service announcement: The 'enable project testing' checkbox has now been enabled for all contrib projects! To enable automatic testing of patches for your contrib project, visit the 'Edit -> Issues' subtab on your project page; the checkbox can be found under the 'testing' fieldset.

Advisory Coder Reviews

Most are already familiar with the Coder module, which can be used to generate an automated report regarding common programming errors and Drupal coding style violations for a given module (or core). So when we talk about 'advisory coder reviews', The 'coder review' part is pretty well understood ... but we're often asked what the 'advisory' piece means.

The answer to that is fairly straight-forward ... in terms of Drupal's automated testing infrastructure, an 'advisory' test is one which can return a pass/fail result which will not be included in the logic when calculating the overall pass/fail result for the patch or branch in question. In other words, we don't want a 'Coder review' failure (and we expect many!) to result in the test bots failing an otherwise successful patch.

For now, we've enabled this feature on branch tests ... but if all goes well, it could be enabled on patch reviews in the future as well.

The first place you will see this feature in action is via the 'Automated Testing' tab on a given module's project page. Instead of the usual "PASSED: [[SimpleTest]]: [MySQL] 33 pass(es)" test result message, we will now start seeing something a little more convoluted for tests from this point forward:

PASSED: [[SimpleTest]]: [MySQL] 33 pass(es); [[Coder]]: [Coder] 1 minor(s), 2 critical(s), and 42 normal(s).

To date, we've generally only had one testing plugin (SimpleTest) and one testing environment (MySQL) active ... but that changes with the introduction of this feature. Incidently, the pattern used here is [[Testing Plugin]]: [Test Environment] Result;.

Detailed Coder Results

So where can you find the detailed Coder results? These are made available through qa.drupal.org. The first step is to click on your 'View Test' link:

The Coder tab can be a little hard to find, but it's in the Details tab, underneath the 'Summary' bar:

Scroll down, and you should find your detailed Coder review results!

Note that Coder is known to raise a few false positives, and we are running it on it's strictest settings ... so don't go beating yourself up trying to achieve a 100% pass result! And if you do run into a Coder false positive, please consider submitting a patch!

Enjoy!