This thread and Dominiques original messages beg the question, Are
we again shooting Silver Bullets over The Tower of Babel?
Yes, Selenium appears to be running ahead of the web testing pack.
However, scripts written by non-techies sounds like an oxymoron.
Non-techies sing crude lyrics. They whisper seductive doggerel in
virgins ears. To me, users who write test scripts are techies who
enjoy their meaningful lives several elevator buttons above
non-techies.
Gerald Weinbergs old book, The Psychology of Computer Programming,
raised the issue, that, in spite of talk of man-machine interfaces,
it is easier to communicate with a retarded person than a computer.
It probably still is. Retarded people dont make you type and spell
precisely. They understand accents, inflections, intentional meaning
and body language. They have better vocabularies than voice
recognition software.
Presumably, users developing scripts saying "user fills up the Name
field with value Smith" would need technical skills for testing,
typing, spelling, understanding business rules and logic,
communicating, etc. If users can develop test scripts, it may be
because systems departments have been pushing problems onto users for
so long and users are generally good people. We should not
underestimate their expertise or their frustrations.
In principal, technically skilled users could (and perhaps, should)
develop their own test scripts. (Wouldnt it be fun if users could
check what you accomplished or didnt accomplish each morning?) On
the downside, Id expect, that as soon as users are given a good test
tool, they will be faced with difficult questions on what to test and
how. Will their test click a link or open a page via the href
attribute? If a button has an over event and a mouse out event and
it causes a form to send request variables to a target with a
validate script in-between, do you want a non-techie building the
tests? What are valid tests results in varying situations? In spite
of decades of technical experience, Im grappling with these
questions myself. Looks like many tests require judgement calls.
Acceptance Testing could be straightforward, but, as soon as page
objects controls multi-page flow, the path mapping complicates the
results.
I guess were getting into what can and should be tested. People are
still writing on the web that you cant test everything. Perhaps
almost everything can and should be tested, given good tools. What
can and should a user test? If users are given test tools, how long
before we blame them for all our failures? "Listen you user, you
wrote the test, I passed the test, now ..."
Have people written about what to test and how to test earlier on
the Selenium lists or elsewhere on the web? Links would be helpful.
Other problems users might face, "Aahz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
suggested users take the Selenium recorder for a spin. Besides
Dominiques timing issue of how to write tests before pages are
developed, the recorder seems to only create actions and navigation,
not Selenium verify commands. As for names and Ids, many web tools
do not force object naming, so names are not commonly used.
Developers dont seem to name web page objects. Of the half dozen IT
related companies headlining at Bob Pelleys October tecSocial here
in Cape Breton (www.tecsocial.ca), only one that I looked at used
object names extensively on their own websites. (Not a big sample, I
know.) Id numbers seem to change in IE as objects are inserted or
moved in the DOM. The phrase I read was that Web pages are
brittle. Users can be brittle too.
Dominique, before you develop you idea, you might manually test your
premise on a few pages that are in development and changing. You
could have users tell you what they want.
"User clicks on the Cancel button" becomes more difficult to
implement in Selenium if you have to go down several frame layers or
down a window to hit the button. And although a < BUTTON> tag has
been defined in HTML, most buttons are <INPUT> tags. The <INPUT> tags
has many other type attributes.
You would have to account for all buttons or enforce shop standards
on tags used. Some of the quicksand around this Tower of Babel is
the mess of HTML. If you pick only the <BUTTON> tag as standard and
let test in your new commands fail for <INPUT> button tags, youll
catch non-compliance but youll give your developers nervous
breakdowns.
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