DeveloperGuidelines

Testing

"A bug is a test case you haven't written yet"
"Unit Tests allow merciless ​refactoring"

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.
Behaviour-Driven Development takes this further to focus on the Specification rather than the Verification using something like ​pyspec or ​PyFITto provide testable specs:

• ​http://behaviour-driven.org
• ​http://fitnesse.org/FitNesse.AcceptanceTests

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/

A community available for assistance:

• ​http://lists.idyll.org/listinfo/testing-in-python

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Testing that Developers should be doing:

Unit Tests (must do)

Building the Code Right

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

These should be written by the developers

• ​DocTest - inline with code: Agile Documentation
  • ​http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/01/python-unit-testing-part-2-doctest.html
  • Web2Py supports running doctests on Controllers from the admin UI, e.g.: ​http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/default/test/sahana/default.py

• ​UnitTest (formerly ​PyUnit)
  • ​http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/01/python-unit-testing-part-1-unittest.html
  • ​Nose - a discovery-based unittest extension

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
• ​Bitten - integrates with Trac

Alternate options which could be investigated:

• ​http://buildbot.net/trac
• ​http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net

Regression Testing

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

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

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 specs: Building the Right Code

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
  • discussion on using Selenium with Web2Py: ​http://groups.google.com/group/web2py/msg/d8c9fd6008029f6b
• ​JMeter

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

Integration Testing (good thing)

We depend on various 3rd-party components so we need to ensure that as these components are upgraded this doesn't break any of out functionality:

• Web2Py
  • CherryPy
  • SimpleJSON
• T2
• OpenLayers
• jQuery
• Ext

Usability Tests

• ​UI Guidelines - comments on UI issues in Sahana2

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