I was lucky to be working with some folks this past week, who are working on a bleeding edge commerce framework and this particular blog is more on the testing frameworks for front end.
I will soon have an article on building a front end store using ROR for Websphere commerce and it will be really useful to automate the test scripts using RSpec and one of the automation tools out there.
This is meant to be 101 for these concepts and I have added links below for deep diving.
BDD and TDD are paradigms essentially bringing the prominence of writing test cases before development and also making it easier on non coders to understand the test cases.
TDD: Test driven development
1. Writing automated test scripts before actually starting to write codes.
2. It is a great idea using any programming language but traditionally development with languages such as Java was pretty high hence it was skipped as the larger development life cycle was blamed for it.
But It makes great sense for using this approach for ROR (Ruby).
3. Test driven development brings lot of clarity to the design in the very early stage of the development cycle.
e.g.
BDD: Behavior Driven Development
1. It extends the concept of the TDD and takes it one level further as it makes writing test scripts in a very expressive way and no programmatic way.
2. It really helps non programmers (BA, QA, PM) to understand the test cases as they are expressed in a simple English like language.
3. Using 'should' when describing the behavior of software to help clarify responsibility and questioning the requirements.
4. Using 'ensure' when describing responsibilities of software to differentiate outcomes in the scope of the code in question from side-effects of other elements of code.
5. Using mocks to stand-in for collaborating modules of code essentially stubbed out without the actual implementation.
e.g. RSPec, Cucumber
Selenium: Selenium IDE and Selenium RC. (Remote Control)
Selenium IDE provides automated way of recoding tests from a Firefox plug in and it has a powerful feature to validate tests by providing several commands to assert the results. It also provides a powerful mechanism to export the test case into a programming language such as Java, Ruby (RSpec),Perl, .etc.
Selenium RC: is a tool that allows you to launch browser sessions and run Selenium tests against those browsers.
To do this, the Selenium RC server acts as an intercepting proxy for the browser
Selenium-IDE does not directly support:
* condition statements
* iteration
* logging and reporting of test results
* error handling, particularly unexpected errors
* database testing
* test case grouping
* re-execution of failed tests
* test case dependency
* screenshot capture of test failures
Flash is not supported as a part of the Selenium-IDE but there is a flash extension for Selenium Flash and it also requires changing the actual Flash action scripts to add methods to be called from Selenium. It is not a very good practice.
The results from the tests can be verified by connecting from the database.
Watir: Watir is automated testing framework. It does not have a IDE of it's own but there is a testwide recorder that can be used. A combination of RSpec and Watir really makes very readable test scripts. It offers Flash support on firefox but I could not find a lot of documentation around this. So I have my doubt's around automating Flash components.
Cucumber is designed to allow you to execute automated integration tests. It is a tool for implementing Behavior Driven Development.It can work in Conjecture with Rspec.
Each feature is expressed as a Give\When\Then
Given: Preconditions to be filled.
When: This section defines what feature does (i.e., the behaviour, the steps).
Then: Testable out come that can be validated.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/ruby/2007/08/09/behavior-driven-development-using-ruby-part-1.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-rspec/
http://wiki.openqa.org/download/attachments/400/Selenium+IDE.swf?version=1
http://www.rubyinside.com/cucumber-the-latest-in-ruby-testing-1342.html
