I would like to see discussion about testing kept alive, so I have taken the unprecedented step of doing some investigation on my own - but not much; I am counting on the community picking this up and helping us get to a useful OFBiz standard solution.
As I learn more, I see that the capture/playback mode of Grinder is very limited. The next step up seems to be WebTest with its ability to script tests. WebTest, essentially, emulates a browser and looks like it would be very eary to use - especially for acceptance testing. Grinder may be a better tool for performance testing. Selenium goes one step further and, instead of emulating a browser, it installs a Javascript shell in the browser (after it starts the browser automatically from the selenium server) and receives requests from the server (request that you send to the server, either interactively or via scripts), causes the browser, itself, to execute those requests, thereby testing the web application under test. There seems to be much more to getting a selenium environment working, but it would appear that the testing would be more rigourous. This is where the size of the OFBiz community should help. Whereas, it may not be cost-effective for one party to get selenium working for their own use, we should be able to tap into the experience of the entire community to get a ready cookbook for setting up selenium and for writing tests for various standard modules. Also, there would be many reusable subtest and techniques that could be shared. It would seem that Selenium would be the way to go as OFBiz interfaces start using more AJAX interactions - because it uses actual browsers to run the tests. Of course, I am getting ahead of myself - annointing a winner before there has been a consensus. Anyone have some experience/s to share? -Al
