The Wikitest Framework

UPDATE: I want to do a post on the importance of limiting ambiguity and making sure you have as much meaningful consensus as possible - a counterbalance to my last post. Still, that's going to be a whopper. I also want to respond to some of Shrini and Llya's comments. Again, those will be be long. So, here's something in the mean time.

I put this post out to the Agile-FTT list this morning, and I thought it was worth sharing here:

(Snip)
...I think it's about time I talked about my new gig. My company, Socialtext, produces enterprise wikis that are secure, hosted if you want, appliance-delivered if you don't. We have a test framework called wikitests that we give away free. Wikitests are a non-technical-user friendly framework that sits on top of selenium that enables you to express tests on a wiki page that is freely editable and version-controlled.

With the hosted product, setting up wikitest is as easy as making a page like this:

(Login)
(New Page - "Test Shopping Cart for Foo")
| open_ok | http://www.foo.com |
| type_ok | search | foo bars |
| click_ok | search-btn | |
| text_like | Search Results for 'foo bars' (24) |
| click_ok | link=Foo Bars 8 Oz. Size |
| text_like | $10.00 |
| text_like | case of 24 |
| click_ok | link=Checkout |
...
etc.

Now, I don't claim this tool will solve all your problems. It forces someone to actually write specific tests tied to GUI components, probably using a tool like firebug. If you want to do quick tests, stress tests or load tests, it will probably not provide a high amount of ROI. I do claim that it's a nice mixture of the fitnesse feel with selenium keyword-driven goodness. (I am not a sales guy, I am a test lead, fwiw.)

Because it's based on selenium RC, you can fire up the server and watch the screen scroll by - you can also set the speed. This means that if the GUI is tied to your computer, you can watch the test fly by, which can be helpful in finding rendering errors.

I'm going to work on a demo for it, hopefully next week. In the mean time, if you'd just like to explore a cool, free, hosted wiki, there is a free trial version on www.socialtext.com.

Finally, Al, my company, Socialtext, is a Palo-Alto based company currently seeking a product manager. Socialtext.com. Shoot me a resume.


--matt heusser
xndev.blogspot.com
matt.heusser@gmail.com