DeveloperGuidelines

Testing

"A bug is a test case you haven't written yet"
"Unit Tests allow merciless refactoring": ​http://diveintopython.org/refactoring/refactoring.html

Test-Driven Development is a programming styles which says that you 1st write your test cases (from the specs) & then proceed to make them pass.

There are a huge number of Testing Tools available to cover the various parts of the Testing process:

• ​http://pycheesecake.org/wiki/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy
• ​http://vallista.idyll.org/~grig/articles/

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Testing that Developers should be doing:

Unit Tests (must do)

• ​http://diveintopython.org/unit_testing/index.html

These should be written by the developers

• Doc Tests
  • ​http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/01/python-unit-testing-part-2-doctest.html
• UnitTest (formerly ​PyUnit)
  • ​http://docs.python.org/library/unittest.html
  • ​http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/01/python-unit-testing-part-1-unittest.html
  • ​Nose - a discovery-based unittest extension
• Py.Test
  • ​http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/01/python-unit-testing-part-3-pytest-tool.html

• Rspec is an equivalent for Ruby: ​http://rspec.info/

Continuous Integration

Whenever a commit is made it should be checked to see that it doesn't break anything

• ​Patch Queue Manager - integrates with Bzr
• ​Cruise Control - alternate option which could be investigated

Regression Testing

Fired by dev after certain number of changes or whenever they like.

• ​http://docs.python.org/library/test.html
• ​http://www.pycheesecake.org/
  • Case Study: ​http://pycheesecake.org/wiki/CleaningUpPyBlosxom

Documentation

As well as writing DocStrings in all functions, we can generate an overall API using:

• ​http://epydoc.sourceforge.net

If writing a separate manual then we can use:

• ​http://docutils.sourceforge.net

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Testing that Testers should be doing:

Boundary Testing (should do)

Checks functionality of modules against spec.
This sees the application as a black box & so the same tests could be run here against both the Python & PHP versions, for instance.

Functional tests can be written using:

• ​Selenium
• ​JMeter

This is done by the Testers who accept the Code as a result.

Integration Testing (good thing)

Usability Tests

Accessibility

• Are we XHTML 1.0 compliant?
• Are we usable without JavaScript?

Performance Tests

Whilst the Web2Py framework is fast, we should check that we're not doing anything stupid to slow it down:

• ​http://groups.google.com/group/web2py/browse_thread/thread/cf5c5bd53bc42d49

Stress Tests

• ​http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/
• Siege

Security Tests

Whilst the Web2Py framework is secure by design, we should validate this:

• ​http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/examples/default/features

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DeveloperGuidelines