CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We've been writing functional tests for core and some of our custom work and extensions in Selenium. It's a fairly tedious coding approach, and prone to needing rewrites for small changes in UI. I understand there are also issue with phantom fails of the tests and a need to insert lots of pauses to allow page elements to load, which leads to the test suites taking a very long time to run.

I have had discussions with a few people about using behat as a more user friendly way of writing acceptance tests and functional tests.

The following post from Lullabot has some interesting points about the successful use of CasperJS in this area: https://www.lullabot.com/blog/article/testing-front-end-casperjs?utm_source=Lullabot+Announcements&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=e82b2ddac2-Lullabot+Weekly+RSS&mc_eid=3a5ec93314&utm_term=0_7a64ff23fe-e82b2ddac2-52099882&mc_cid=e82b2ddac2

The post suggests that in addition to faster completion that writing new tests would be faster. And that CasperJS works well with AngularJS. I'm not sure where we are with possibly moving towards an MVC framework in the browser (I think it is coming along), but we're definitely doing lots of JQuery stuff. Not sure if there would be benefits of CasperJS over Selenium in terms of DX (developer experience) but it sounds like there would be.

Like any sort of change in infrastructure, I think we should dip our toes in, learn about it, then make plans to migrate, perhaps over a version or two. For example, if we decided on a new test infrastructure then we could say that it was required for all new tests, and perhaps as old tests needed to be refactored we would rewrite into new technology.