How Is XenForo Being Tested

[ibnesayeed]

Often time when I plot a graph (in my mind of course) between their development speed vs. number of discovered bugs, I am surprised to see the slope of the curve. Then the obvious question is, "how they test the back-end and front-end?" In some languages like Ruby, they have pretty good frameworks for testing and some developers tend to use behavioral/test driven development paradigm (I am not sure about PHP though, there must be something but, I did not see it in trend). Front-end testing is again very much manual every where. Well, there are Selenium IDE and similar solutions but, when it comes to JavaScript heavy applications and cross browser testing, those solutions just don't work. For JavaScript heavy applications, there is something called headless browsing (e.g. Phantom JS), but then you will have to write lots of test routines and probably taking screenshots on every event then eyeball through.

One reason behind their rapid development and still producing least bugs is indeed their excellence and experience. But, it would be nice if they can share their thoughts on it.

 

[ragtek]

[offtopic] I don't know how mike & kier are testing but

Well, there are Selenium IDE and similar solutions but, when it comes to JavaScript heavy applications and cross browser testing, those solutions just don't work. For JavaScript heavy applications, there is something called headless browsing (e.g. Phantom JS), but then you will have to write lots of test routines and probably taking screenshots on every event then eyeball through.

One reason behind their rapid development and still producing least bugs is indeed their excellence and experience. But, it would be nice if they can share their thoughts on it.

Selenium is exactly for the

JavaScript heavy applications and cross browser testing,

(functional tests) http://seleniumhq.org/projects/remote-control/

selenium rc controlls your IE,FF,Opera,... and because it's "ONLY" a test, which runs in the browser, all the JS stuff can be tested

 

[ibnesayeed]

Selenium is exactly for the
(functional tests) http://seleniumhq.org/projects/remote-control/

selenium rc controlls your IE,FF,Opera,... and because it's "ONLY" a test, which runs in the browser, all the JS stuff can be tested

Thanks Sir, I really need to update myself then. I remember, last time I used selenium FireFox add-on was in 2008. I used it for simple browsing (clicking on links and filling out forms etc.)

 

[ragtek]

Thanks Sir, I really need to update myself then. I remember, last time I used selenium FireFox add-on was in 2008. I used it for simple browsing (clicking on links and filling out forms etc.)

Yes, silenium IDE is a firefox add-on, to "record" simple tests.
Selenium IDE is also able to translate/export the tests into several programming languages (http://seleniumhq.org/about/platforms.html#programming-languages )

That's really cool.
While i was beta tester for xxx i've recorded > 20 tests. (installation, setting acp options, creating forums, creating threads,posts,...etc...)
Then you can export them all to php, integrate some more features & customize them (for example to be able to use the same test for x user registrations because you can't have a hardcoded username (isn't unique..))
That's a real time safer

It's IMO also a "MUST" for big boards before you install an add-on or upgrade to next major version...

If you're smart (but not smart enough for other ways), you can also use the tests for automatic application upgrades (Also a big time safer if you need to upgrade > 2 boards

The biggest problem is to find the time to create good tests

 

[ibnesayeed]

I realize that due to rapid version number changes in FireFox, several add-ons cannot keep up with the latest stable build of FireFox.

Last week, I needed to load some JavaScript rich webpages in a pre-specified order for my research work. I thought of using Selenium but due to this FireFox version issue, I was gone crazy and I replicated desired JavaScript effect out of those pages in Ruby for some good reasons.

 

[ragtek]

Yes, the f*cking firefox upgrades & addons make me also crazy