Deliverable #3

For this deliverable we wrote a bash script to integrate our different robot frame-work tests scripts. The end goal of this script is some sort of html page that will work as a summary of our test suite results. Right now our testing is limited to the behavior of the client using a web-driver. Tangentially we can test other components of the webstack by testing different client pages which rely on other subsystems in the server code. Later on we plan to have a companion driver integrated into our bash script that can execute component testing.

Currently we are running the test script in the web2py environment so that we have access to the entire webstack. Latter on this will be useful for testing things like the database, business logic, service APIs, etc.

Initially implementation of this project was less than ideal. Because we want to test the behavior of the client, which is somewhat of a complex proposition, we are leveraging preexisting testing code that defines simpler behavior from which we can describe more complex behavior to test for. For instance, from their testing library they have a start browser procedure that we can use in our own code before checking other client behavior like links, data entry, account creation etc. Unfortunately we were not able to write a script in the most straight forward manner so their are some quirks to our implementation. First quirk is that their test suite requires new tests to be in their test suite directory, to solve this we symlinked our test executable folder to their directory. Second quirk, because we want our tests to run sequentially, we are moving and removing our test scripts into this folder as the test driver runs. As we get more familiar with the robot framework we will be able to move more of the functionality in to our own code and use less of the preexisting code and/or use their code more effectively allowing us to simplify the testing process.

Closing thoughts, We our happy with the prototype script and are excited to write test cases for it. In the future we plan to add a bit of design to the html report, as it stands it is quite plain. Finally, as we become more familiar with the preexisting code we will add different types of test cases to our test suite.

Framework Installation