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/BDDProcess
• ​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

• ​DocTest - inline with code: Agile Documentation
  • Web2Py supports running doctests on Controllers from the admin UI, e.g.: ​http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/default/test/sahana/default.py
  • ​http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/01/python-unit-testing-part-2-doctest.html
  • DocTests for HTML apps (good since in-process hence can capture errors): ​http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2006/04/in-process-web-app-testing-with-twill.html
    • Uses wsgi_intercept: ​http://code.google.com/p/wsgi-intercept/
  • ​dutest - DocTest UnitTest integration (includes HTML-aware output checkers such as ​lxml.doctestcompare.LHTMLOutputChecker)
    • ​http://ojs.pythonpapers.org/index.php/tpp/article/viewArticle/56

• ​UnitTest (formerly ​PyUnit)
  • ​http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/01/python-unit-testing-part-1-unittest.html
  • ​http://diveintopython.org/unit_testing/index.html
  • ​Nose - a discovery-based unittest extension
  • ​Webunit - adds supports for HTTP GET/POST testing to unittest
  • ​WebTest - CherryPy's extensions to unittest
    • ​http://www.cherrypy.org/browser/trunk/cherrypy/test/webtest.py

Continuous Integration

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

• ​Bitten - integrates with Trac
• ​CruiseControl - integrates with Trac: ​https://oss.werkbold.de/trac-cc/
• ​Patch Queue Manager - integrates with Bzr (allows branch merging)

Alternate options which could be investigated:

• ​http://buildbot.net/trac
• ​http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/CI+Feature+Matrix

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 as part of ​Acceptance:

Boundary Testing (should do)

Building the Right Code

Checks functionality of modules against specs

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

Sahana is a Web-based application, so testing should be from browser perspective:

Functional tests can be written using ​Selenium:

• This is currently being integrated into SahanaPy in 2 ways, both can start with developing the tests using Selenium IDE
  • Export as Python Selenium RC, then modify based on this discussion: ​http://groups.google.com/group/web2py/msg/d8c9fd6008029f6b
    • These Tests are stored in /tests
  • Save as HTML, convert to .py using ​make_selenium.py, maintain in Python, then convert back to HTML to store in /static/selenium/tests
• A lot of Selenium-related articles: ​http://vallista.idyll.org/~grig/articles/

Alternate opions which could be investigated:

• ​Mechanize - library for programming website browsing
  • ​Twill is built on Mechanize
  • ​zope.testbrowser is built on Mechanize (& not Zope-specific)
• MaxQ: ​http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/02/web-app-testing-with-python-part-1.html
• ​TestMonkey - not ready for primetime but worth keeping an eye on
• ​JMeter
• ​Badboy
• ​Paste

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 our 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

Load Tests

How many simultaneous users can the system support?

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

Stress Tests

If extreme load is applied to the application, does it recover gracefully?

• Tools above but using more extreme parameters parameters

Security Tests

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

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

Things developers can do to reduce risks:

• ​http://www.sans.org/top25errors/#cat1

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Sahana 2 Links: ​http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php?id=dev:home#design_and_development_guides

DeveloperGuidelines