Symbioware next generation testing
Why I love Symbioware & you should too http://symbioware.com/overview.html
Testing web applications is tough. It’s so hard, that I encourage most developers to keep as much code out of the webapp as possible. For java this means turning off scriplets and using JSTL as much as possible. Ruby has a pretty good setup already, but making your code testable via modules is a must. With PHP templeting with Smarty and other addons is a good idea.
Why is it so tough? First you need to spin up a webcontainer and add test harnesses to talk to the webapp. Many times the only option is to use HTTP to exercise the test cases, and using HTTP mean scraping web pages, not fun.
Second using HTTP, means the testing client is getting active scripting. There are almost no clients our there which can handle active scripts. This is a shame because a good web enable application may have lots good features in active script.
Finally, there is every changing presentation. A form which says email may say username tomorrow. The testing code, which is often written in XML or some scripting language can’t keep up.
The solution comes in the form of products like Symbioware. It uses IE browser to parse web pages and it fully supports everything that IE does. That solves problems 1 & 2.
Symbioware, has a great WSYSIWYG interface. Creating new test cases is easy, you see can interact with your web page. It is also easy to keep up with changes, you see it. No more digging through code.
Its fantastic. Higher Quality means less time fixing bugs, which means more features faster.