We are using webdriverIO version 4 in a quite a few frameworks where I work. While undertaking the review of one of the frameworks, the option of upgrading to version 5 was recommended. However, the framework is not the most straightforward and there will be a lot of manual fixes needed to commands in many places and the time needed for it is just not known.
Hence the question, what is the risk if we don't upgrade webdriverIO at all? Any dependencies stopping successful builds or browser version incompatibilities affecting test execution? And how soon are these likely to be realised.
Any pointers that can enable this review will be great help.
One of the major risks of not updating over the long-term is Node version support dropping. As new versions of Node are released, you'll likely want to upgrade to the latest. However, since older versions of WebdriverIO won't be tested on these new Node versions, there may be incompatibilities between the two.
Apart from that, other drawbacks include:
Missing out on important new features. For example, WebdriverIO v6 includes 'waits' by default now, so you no longer have to include so many "waitFor" commands, and your tests will be less brittle.
Security Updates via dependencies. While not as important, considering tests aren't normally public facing, it's still nice to have the latest features available.
Unable to make feature requests. There's a very low chance that you'd be able to get any new features added to old versions of WDIO, especially v4. This means you'd have to do it all yourself.
Less likely to get help. If something breaks or you're in need of outside help, being on an older version will hinder any help others can provide as they'll be much less experienced with it.
I've upgraded many test suites from 4 -> 5 and while it wasn't the easiest transition, it was also very doable. Unless you have something very complicated going on, I'd put the upgrade at a week tops. It took me about a work day or two to update mine, but it wasn't the most complex code (on purpose).
Related
I am extremely new to mobile developing and have recently been put in charge of updating a React-Native app using Expo, that hasn't been touched in about 18 months.
I am familiar with creating web applications or websites from scratch and thinking about debugging from a creation standpoint with updated code that is not deprecated but the idea of updating old code is foreign to me.
Can someone help share their thought process when it comes to this?
The mobile app itself runs alright - crashes and malfunctions from time to time.
Is the idea to go in and see what code is deprecated and which dependencies need to be updated? And/Or is the idea to try and find what is making the code crash and malfunction and leave deprecated code and old dependencies?
Thanks for your patience with what seems like a silly question.
And/Or is the idea to try and find what is making the code crash and malfunction and leave deprecated code and old dependencies?
It is typically recommended that crashes and malfunctions should be resolved before updating libraries. Some libraries may introduce further crashes and errors after upgrade due to breaking changes and deprecation. As such it would be difficult to separate code bugs from errors caused by library upgrades.
If some of the bugs and crashes cannot be resolved without library update, then fix as much as you can before updating the library.
Is the idea to go in and see what code is deprecated and which dependencies need to be updated?
This question is subjective. It depends on how much time can be spared for the upgrade process. Obviously, updating libraries can have other small benefits like improving performance or reducing code size etc, but if a library that is used extensively in code (eg. react-navigation) has not been updated for many major releases then update/ refactor and testing will take a long time and may not be worth the time if nothing is broken.
Furthermore, it is easier to update libraries regularly and frequently rather than wait for the current version to be deprecated. This way, we avoid having to deal with tons of breaking changes in one go.
When the developer of an API, e.g., Microsoft, Apple or me, announces a feature of the API is being deprecated, how long should the API developer wait before removing the feature from the API?
From the other point of view, how long should a user of an API expect to have to refactor code after an API feature is marked as deprecated?
If you move from version A to B, you should directly remove deprecated methods.
Unless you know that you won't need later upgraded version then you may keep what's working.
But as every problem, the sooner you take them on, the easier it'll be.
It's usually easy enough to change deprecated code from version A to B, but if you cumulate modifications, it'll be a nightmare
Once you discover APIs that are marked as deprecated, you should start looking to update your software to replace them with non-deprecated methods. If you continue to use them, you run the risk of your software not working on newer versions. This is fine if you never plan on upgrading, as evidenced by the multitude of Win 3.1 software still in use. However, if you are going to be supporting the software or releasing new versions, you should update as soon as feasible.
Usually, the API never removes features due to the fact that some programs will be rendered useless if they rely on a certain method. But if the method is honestly useless or contains a lot of bugs, they remove it after two or three updates.
I recently asked a question on updating programming packages (on systems that provide programmer tools via packages) for which there has been no response. This leads me to ask the following question. As a software developer over the years, I've encountered enough bugs in tools that lead me to want to keep at the most recent stable release/update. The important caveat being that near the release date of a component, only clearly necessary changes are introduced. I would like to get a better understanding of the spectrum of how developers deal with new releases to the tools they use. So what do YOU do? Monitor mail lists and update to new releases after careful analysis or on a whim? Take whatever releases project management provides/permits? Out of desperation in response to a gnarly bug you're trying to fix? Something else entirely?
I would like to get a better understanding of the spectrum of how developers deal with new releases to the tools they use. So what do YOU do?
I grab the final release of the new tools as soon as it's available. That is in my private environment.
At work there is often just one specific version which is bought and expected to be used for several years. Developers cannot influence that.
At home I develop in Xcode. I maintain at least 2 versions of the environment, the current official release and the latest beta release. Both versions are kept up to date. If there are any issues with any of my projects and a new release of Xcode, I fix the issues with my project. Under no circumstances will I keep an older environment around for compatibility reasons. Most of my development is done against the stable API unless I need a feature from the beta API. All testing is done in both environments, so that hopefully I'll be able to catch bugs related to API changes as soon as possible. I don't know if I should credit my mad development skills or the quality of Apple's releases, but I rarely encounter any issues with API/SDK changes.
At work I develop in Visual Studio 2005 / Windows XP. It's horrible and there's nothing we can do about it.
We are in mid of a project where we have used an extended Dojo 1.1.1 to meet the customer requirement and add richness.
But there are quite some bugs and performance problems with this version of Dojo and
we are looking ahead to migrate the Dojo version to overcome both the issues, but the migration cycle seems to be quite painful and may not be yield expected result.
The concern we have is with the various extension which we have created with the version of Dojo for components that were provided in 1.1.1 and the impact on them after migration.But, the advantage we see are equally important.
As per Dojo , they have kept some level of compatibility with version 1.1.1 but i have not seen any discussion around this anywhere.
Has any body else previously done
migrated between Dojo version?
Will the components like Grid will
work as expected or will i need to
carry out a refactoring exercise?
Do we have any commercial support
available as the forum seems to
deprecated?
Any help or suggestions are welcome
Dojo has had a policy of freezing and supporting public APIs since 1.0. Migrations prior to 1.0 were extremely painful. Now, it should be much better, provided you use only public APIs. Code written for stable JS APIs in Dojo or Dijit in 1.1 should largely still work. Exceptions are noted in the release notes, which you should explore (good luck finding them... unfortunately the site is a bit of a mess)
If you wrote any custom widgets, you're probably in for some extra work. dojox.grid was not particularly stable at that point, and it has also seen a major rewrite since then (there is an old 'compat' layer you may wish to use)
Regarding for forum, like the note says, you can either use the active dojo-interest mailing list or post questions here at SO. There are some firms which offer commercial support, but that's outside of the scope of Dojo as an open source project. (try googling 'Dojo commercial support' or asking on dojo-interest)
I have done 5 dojo migrations now (from 0.2 -> 1.4) over the last few years. Although the API does not change, you will often have coded in workarounds that no longer work after upgrading. Things I have noticed:
quality in 1.4 is VERY good and worth
upgrading to (even from 1.3)
although
the API does not change, little
things that are not public often
change slightly (diji.Tree
itemNodeMap -> itemNodesMap in 1.4)
build options are usually added each
release but not always publicised -
strage really as they are always
useful improvement
since you are 1.1.1, you should change all your set attribute calls to 'attr' - this could take a while to do.
As for commercial support, you could try Sitepen
I use Intellij Idea 7 for Java dev. My dev is 'limited' to all J2SE features plus light JSP, Servlets, and super light usage of JPA. No J2EE, no massive use of random frameworks, etc.
Is it worth upgrading to ver 8? "Worth it" to me means better "core functionality" in terms of speed (ESPECIALLY startup speed), memory utilization (seems like it starts having serious problems with four or more projects open), and auto bug-finding.
More frameworks supported and more languages supported (other than perhaps Haskell and C++), and more refactorings don't interest me at this time.
A while back, I installed a preview version of 8 and it seemed -exactly- the same as 7, as far as my needs were concerned.
Anyone loving the upgrade to 8, and if so, why?
Thanks
It also seems to be easier to configure a new project over top of a complex collection of existing code.
For example, something that you would naturally configure into 5 or more modules.
There is a really beautiful go to/create test wizard that is bound to ctrl-shift-T. Worth the upgrade by itself
The best way to tell is to check out the list of new features and decide for yourself. I haven't discovered any single feature so far that by itself is worth upgrading - the simplified UML view is quite nice, as is the improved Maven integration. The UI feels a bit more streamlined and faster. It seems like most of the attention has gone into non-Java features like better Flex support (which I am really thankful for as I don't like FlexBuilder but I haven't had a chance to use yet).
IntelliJ 8 has a configure plugins feature that allows you to disable plugins with dependencies. Nothing trial and error couldn't replicate, but it is nice.
Startup is only marginally slower. But indexing once opened is a lot faster than before, even unnoticeable for most projects, except after a commit to Subversion. It seems a commit to subversion triggers the indexing twice.
I am working on the Diana-EAP build - but 8 has git integration built in. The EAP has better git integration than the 8.0.1 release - it looks like that is something they are really focusing on.
Definitely not! Seems that the variables defined in our custom taglibs are no longer able to be used in the jsp (worked in 7.0.4). All red. No auto complete.
Oh, and the new settings menu is horrendous!
Some benefits of IntelliJ IDEA 8:
IDEA 8 supports Subversion 1.5 new functionality - e.g. merge tracking, which may be useful especially if your team (like ours) uses a lot of development branches and thus merging is frequent.
One detail I appreciated about IDEA 8: As you probably know, IDEA has had changelists for pretty long now, built on top of any underlying version control system - this is a really useful feature. So, now that Subversion itself supports changeslists, IDEA's changelist implementation has been changed so that it is perfectly compatible with Subversion's native changeslists. (For example, you'll be able to work with any changelists created in IDEA also when using svn command line tools directly.)
Edit: in your case, perhaps it is not worthwhile to upgrade. For me, at least, startup and file indexing seems to be somewhat slower in 8 than 7. [But for me personally the upgrade was definitely worth it, because it solved a long-standing VCS problem with IDEA 7 - it could hang "waiting for VCS sync to finish" for an hour or whatever after hitting Ctrl-K.]