The State of Testing 2008

Hi everyone! It's been some time since I've last put out a blog entry; So I thought it would be an appropriate time to give everyone a little bit of an update into whats going on with Liferay and our QA testing process. In the past few months from when I last posted we were at 191 automated tests, as I write we've just about crested 400 fully automated tests testing various components of Liferay. Definitely an improvement, but it certainly feels that we're still only hitting on the tip of the iceberg! Knowing that we're still falling short of completley comprehensive tests, I'm still proud of the breadth and depth of what we've got now compared to six months ago.

Some of the latest and greatest tests we've automated include: automated testing of Staging and Publishing content, LAR imports, File uploads using DocLib and Image Gallery, Wiki tests, and Session Expiration tests. If you're looking to try running some of these tests on your own, be sure to follow some of the instructions I've written about in previous blogs and keep an eye on wiki.liferay.com/index.php/Selenium_Testing.

One of the bigger changes we've made in recent times has been changing the default mode Selenium tests are run in to:

No, no, not Wii mode. (Though I am an avid gamer and eagerly await Rock Band for my Wii.) Firefox CHROME mode! We've recently made this change to enable testing of more 'advanced' features, such as file uploading. Previously, we were unable to test any such advanced features because of Javascript security restrictions that we couldn't quite find an ideal workaround for. Fortunately even as we run in Chrome mode, we're still able to switch back Firefox regular mode and run all tests (excluding advanced tests), and even beyond that we've been able to run the automated tests under IE (though admittedly this is still buggy)! The default browser modes the tests are running in can be changed in test-portal-web.properties.

Anywho, it certainly feels like we've come a ways to get to where we're at in terms of automated testing. If anyone has any questions, advice, thoughts, or flames, please feel free to let me know.

-jr out

[Thiago Moreira]

hey JR nice post! I love automated tests!!