[Zope] Idea: ZTest: Integrated Use-case based web site testing.

[David Kankiewicz]

Having stayed current with all the email in most of the Zope mailing groups
(about two months) it seems to be one tool that everyone sees as
future/present solution, depending on ones needs. Most comment that it
needs this or that, a Scheduler as come up before. Someone said make a web
page and call the URL from an external program.. Its would be nice to have
a simple interface to something like this and nicer have management without
the need to access the underlying system.

I, much like this person, have an over active imagination for zope products
and would like to at least try my (very new python) hand at creating a
Scheduler.  (I know anyone could do it a lot faster then me if they had the
time).

As this case points out it could be used to do almost anything, from
checking to see if everything is working (if someone implemented it) to
ZCataloging everything not ZCatalogAware on a night/weekly basis (something
any site might want to do). And every product Zope gets makes it that much
easier to work within odd situations.

So I'm going to get together the requirements, functionality, and see if I
can implement and learn a little more about python in the process, and Zope
for that matter.

If someone wants to suggest use cases for a Scheduler or ZTest (I'll
probably never get to programming it), I'll maintain the ideas and maybe
someone will make use of them in the future.


At 11:37 AM 8/27/99 +1000, Jay, Dylan wrote:
>To much caffeine and some morning reading
>(http://www.rational.com/products/rup/prodinfo/whitepapers/dynamic.jtmpl?doc
>_key=101057) has given me a bit of a brainwave.

>When building complex dynamic site testing is very important. I've created
>use-cases and test plans for my web-site. I've investigated automatic site
>testing tools a little bit but have found them a) expensive b) not very good
>when it comes to testing dynamic content and getting past authentication.
>What if a Zope site could test it self regularly and just mail the webmaster
>when something is wrong?

Sense authentication is internal and if ZTest was setup to take this into
account it would be easy to test most objects/methods.

>
>So what I envisage is test-case objects that have a specification of a
>certain scenario and expected results. It would be a series of URLs with
>parameters to be given and a specification of what the requested page should
>look like. Since this is internal to Zope then some information about what
>is interesting and what is not can probably be leveraged. Such ZTestCase
>objects can be created either by instrumenting the site and  then the you
>step through the pages or can be edited manually. Specified code could be
>executed  before and/or after each test case to set and reset test
>conditions. ZTestRun objects can then be created which specify a whole range
>of test-cases to run. 

I see this as manageable as long as the object being tested was not
interacting with databases (unless that part of the system was redirected
to the ZTest or rolled back to pretest condition or restricted to read
only, that is above what I could do right now).


>
>Another idea I had involves the creation of a scheduler inside Zope so that
>specified Zope code could be executed in the future or periodically.
>Caching, indexing, retrieving external data, backup etc and of corse
>scheduling running of test cases.
>
As I said up top, I'm going to look into this shortly..

>Unfortunately for me I seem to have way more ideas than I have time so I
>don't know when I would get time to try implementing it so I thought I'd
>bounce it out into the community to see what others thought.

The Zope community really should have a more formal method of cataloging
Ideas that are suggested and rate the interest and try to set some
priorities, informal of course. Like in the ZCommerce mailing list, ideas
flow fast! :) hope that continues to progress..

Thanks for the interest in and ideas for Zope,
David Kankiewicz
>
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