[Zope-Coders] Website regression testing tool now available

[Richard Jones]

On Fri, 1 Mar 2002 21:15, seb bacon wrote:
> I started trying Richard's tool yesterday.  One problem I had was that
> designing the tests is fairly laborious.

Is designing the tests laborious, or is writing them the difficult part? 
Our tool does try to make the writing part easier, but it's not huge on the 
documentation...

I just wrote a recursive-link-sucker extension to our tool that will let you 
do the most basic of all tests - give it a start page and it'll recursively 
find all the links and pull down all the pages, images and stylesheets it can 
find. Can't get a much easier test than that, but it won't help you notice 
your cookie implementation has gone slightly sideways ;)

I'm about to implement a recording mechanism whereby the page contents are 
saved sideways into a store and checked off by a human validator - future 
tests are then able to compare their results against that store. This human 
validation step is the only one we're missing now (now that we're satisfied 
our cookies will always do the right thing, our HTML is valid and that our 
permission systems are valid, and all the other stuff we're testing for :)


> The thought occured that the
> Andreas-Tool could be used to 'record' individual test scenarios and
> replay them somehow.

Recording-proxy tools are definitely easier to set up tests with, but there's 
issues with cookies, expected page variations and SSL that must be overcome.


      Richard