[JOSS] Contributing guide lacks information on testing

[adswa]

Hey there :) 👋
As part of the JOSS review, I came here to ask for (better) contributor instructions for automated local testing.
I figured out how to run the tests (and they ran successfully) from your GitHub workflows, but I could not find detailed information in the CONTRIBUTING GUIDE, where instructions suggest to rely on the GitHub actions running on submitted PRs. However, there is lot of value in being able to run tests locally -- to give newcomers the chance to contribute or simply test the software locally/on a specific production system.
My suggestion would be extend the contributing guide with a brief section on how to invoke the tests in a development installation (and maybe advice which tests run 'local only' or require access to third party infrastructure (and how to configure that).

[JoeZiminski]

Hi @adswa, thanks a lot for reviewing the JOSS datashuttle submission! That makes a lot of sense, it is not clear at all from the Contributing Guide how to run the tests locally. Something like the below?

1. Add a new section to the contributing guide 'Running the tests'
2. Include some brief information on pytest, the pytest . command from the root folder, and maybe -k command to choose a specific test
3. Notes on which tests will run and which may be skipped and why (e.g. SSH tests require docker installed).

[adswa]

sounds great!

[Sushma-1706]

Thanks for the clarification — that sounds good to me.

I’m currently working on improving the developer documentation (#658), and I can move the test-related content there into the CONTRIBUTING guide as a dedicated “Running tests locally” section.

I’ll include:

• How to run pytest locally
• Notes on which tests require external services (SSH / GDrive / AWS)
• What contributors should expect when running tests from forks

I’ll open a PR shortly once this is done.