Section 32.5. Showing Others

32.5. Showing Others

Once Emily had it all working, she was eager to show it to Don and Mitra. Mitra commented, "The beauty of this approach is that you can see the GUI working while the tests are running. This could be used to show a client how a part of the system works. I suppose it could also be used to generate user documentation as 'movies' or a sequence of screenshots."^[4]

^[4] The Naked Objects system [PM02] uses this sort of approach to generate user documentation in HTML from programmed acceptance tests.

"Yes," replied Emily, "That would be easy to do. That's another good reason to use realistic data in the tests. And when the user interface changes, it would be trivial to regenerate the 'movies."'

Don added, "I expect that you'd notice little odd things that weren't being picked up by the automated tests. It would also be handy to have automated tests that drive the application to a point where you want to do some exploratory testing."

"I'm now ready," Emily concluded, "to start applying this approach to RentEz."

Note

Following are various frameworks for testing Web-based systems. Java-based open source frameworks include^[a]

^[a] See the Web Tools at www.junit.org for the latest list.

• HttpUnit, available at www.httpunit.org

• HtmlUnit, available at http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net

• JWebUnit, available at http://jwebunit.sourceforge.net

• Canoo Web test, available at http://webtest.canoo.com

Of course, these frameworks can be used to test a Web site regardless of the language used to develop the Web application. Similar frameworks are available for other languages.

HtmlFixture is a Fit fixture that in turn uses HtmlUnit. This fixture provides a fixed vocabulary of actions and checks for testing Web-based systems. It's available at http://fitness.org/FitNesse.HtmlFixture.