OSCON: Rock-solid Web Development: Testing Web Apps

John Paul Ashenfelter gave an interesting tutorial called Rock-solid Web Development: Testing Web Apps. The slides are available here. I’d heard about Selenium before this presentation, but never took the time to investigate it – after seeing it used here I’ve already installed it and set it up to test my Rails app. John Paul started out with an overview of software testing, the hierarchy of testing:

  • None
  • Ad Hoc
  • Unit Testing
  • Throwing Bodies at it
  • Bodies with a Test Plan
  • Automated Test Plan

Then he went into the different types of testing:

  • Low-level Code (Unit testing done by developers)
  • App-level (Done by developers and QA)
  • System level (Load, Performance, Stress)
  • User level (Usability/User acceptance)
  • The rest (security, regression, conformance, failover)

His important points were that your users do not do testing and that you should always be testing. The next part of the tutorial covered Selenium. He showed how to run Selenium (the barriers to entry are extremely low – just HTML and JavaScript) and then how to record your own tests using the Selenium IDE. Once he recorded a simple test, which is just an HTML table with three columns, we saw how it could be easily edited and run. Selenium Remote Control was brought-up next and code examples in Java, Python and Ruby were shown – here’s the Ruby example:

  def testHome
puts selenium.open "http://oscon/"
puts selenium.clickAndWait "link=Constitution"
puts selenium.assertTitle "Cat Club - Constitution"
end

The third part of the tutorial covered Automation and Continuous Integration which used Ant to run Selenium. Before Selenium was launched by Ant, dbUnit was used to get the database into a known state prior to the Selenium tests being run. Finally, the Grinder load testing framework was discussed. An alternative, OpenSTA was also briefly mentioned – but John Paul focused on Grinder 3. He showed how you can record a script using the TCPProxy portion of Grinder and then starting and agent and running from the console which hit his server with 100 users (5 processes with 20 threads each). His take home lessions were:

  1. Testing gives you confidence in your code and your application
  2. Users are NOT your testers
  3. Good programmers always write tests
  4. Selenium will save you time
  5. If you repeat it, automate it
  6. Load testing is pretty complicated