Hi all, I have been following the recent discussions about Ofbiz testing
framework(s) with interest, and I thought I would share our experiences. I
intentionally include ofbiz-dev as there seems to be dev work ongoing on the
test framework at the moment. We are integrating an existing application with
Ofbiz, effectively it runs as an Ofbiz module. Our development approach is
fairly test intensive, so we have spent a while trying to be able to maintain
that approach with Ofbiz - it was not enough simply to get the integration
working at the level of the running application.
========== current situation =================
We have 3 kinds of tests-
*Unit Tests proper - run as JUnit tests
*White box integration tests - also run as JUnit tests, but they run
components via the same Spring configuration as the actual application, to test
that too
*Black box web tests - run via Watir/Ruby which exercises the browser, which
allows us to test DHTML behaviour also. Watir with Ruby is a very similar
idea to Grinder with Python - it is VERY useful to be able to express the tests
in a high-level language, and code logical testing constructs as high level
entities. We are a Java shop here but Ruby is MUCH faster than Java for
preparing tests, in fact we now have so little extraneous syntax (which would
be inescapable in Java), that the test scripts are pretty much readable as
documents. I won't discuss Ruby vs. Python here, I think they are both good
languages. The big idea is not to clunk around in Java! And I think a "normal
syntax" imperative language like Rb or Py wins out here over XML, for certain
things like if/else or looping, XML-based languages are just an ugly pain -
look at Ant for example, when you have to put any control logic in.
*Data Loading. For data loading, we use a custom script build on top of
Ruby/Rake which calls MySQL command -line executables. Definitely less
flexible than Entity Engine, nor does it do as much but very fast (3s on a dev
machine to rebuild and repopulate about 100 tables).
========== the Ofbiz Experience =================
The Unit Tests proper, and the Web tests, basically ran with almost no
alterations, once we had the application running inside Ofbiz.
The interesting parts were the integration tests, and the data loading. Our
key problem was time - we run tests constantly, and a particular rule is that a
dev must run all tests succesfully before committing. In a typical 4hr session
he may commit 3 times, so if the tests take 5mins longer, in a team of 4 we can
easily lose 1hr per session.
*Data loading.
We tweaked the main build.xml inside Ofbiz to give us a data load task which
does NOT rebuild Ofbiz (as we donºt alter Ofbiz itself, just use it), and ONLY
loads seed data files (in Entity Engine format) from a certain directory. This
was easy to do as the Entity Engine Data Loader already offers flexibility in
this regard. We still need to put data cleaning in there.
*Integration tests.
We use the new testtools stuff prepared by David. On the whole it works but we
have a few tweaks and suggestions.
**Tweaks.
In framework/base/config/test-containers.xml we removed everything except
component-container, classloader-container, testtools-container. This improves
startup time by about 10%
**Suggestions (David, if you think these have merit, I'd be happy to code them
and submit for your consideration. I am running against ofbiz_opentaps_453703
in case any have already been done).
1. You should be able to tell TestRunContainer to load only tests from a
certain dir or even file. This would allow people to run test cycles at the
level they want, obviously with speed benefits.
2. It should be possible to tell the Entity Engine, via component-container,
NOT to do an Enitty check against the DB when it starts, as 9 times out of 10
nothing has changed and the dev knows it. Again, the objective is to speed up
the test cycle. Perhaps this option already exists and I just couldnºt find
out how to set it!
cameron
P.S. good luck with the conference, sounds good. I live v. far away so won't
be attending!
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