Hey everyone,

Grig and I are thinking of doing another tutorial at PyCon '08, but we'd like to break out of the mold of "intro testing" and do something more exciting for us. Here's a promotional blurb:

Practical Agile Web Testing
---------------------------

Have Web site?  Need testing?  Bring your tired (code), huddled (unit
tests), and cranky AJAX to us; we'll help you come up with tactics,
techniques, and infrastructure to help solve your problems.  This
includes integration with a unit test runner (nose); use of coverage
analysis (figleaf); straight HTTP driver Web testing (twill); Web
recording, examination, and playback (scotch); Selenium and Selenium
RC test script development; and continuous integration (buildbot).
We will focus on techniques for automating your Web testing for quick
turnaround, i.e. "agile" test automation.

Full proposal "below the jump", as they say. Comments welcome!

The plan is to have attendees send us their projects in advance, along with some of the real-world problems they need solved. This can range from "HELP, I need to start testing!" to "What should I do next?" to "How can I test this !#%!%$ JavaScript??" We will then actually implement test code and infrastructure to solve these problems. Getting this to work right will be challenging but fun -- Grig and I both love doing live presentations.

We could use some suggestions, though: in case we get a lot of attendees but no one sends us projects in advance, we'd like to have a few projects on our back burner. What Python Web projects need this kind of testing? Go ahead, hit us ;)

--titus

Full proposal:

Title: Practical Agile Web Testing (Hands-On)

Presenters: C. Titus Brown <titus@idyll.org>
          Grig Gheorghiu <grig@gheorghiu.net>

Intended audience: advanced users.

Tutorial format: hands-on / Q&A.  Attendees should send us actual problems
       from open source projects that need solving (preferably more than
       an hour in advance...)

Recording: We give permission to record and publish my PyCon tutorial for
         free distribution.

Requirements: Python 2.5 or 2.6 installed.  We'll provide media with up-to-date
            packages at the tutorial.

Notes for reviewers: we've done two testing tutorials before, with good
      comments afterward.  The goal here is to break out of the mold of
      pre-planned presentations and tackle some real-life problems for people.
      We will prepare in advance, but using other people's source code as
      a starting point.

Promotional summary:

Have Web site?  Need testing?  Bring your tired (code), huddled (unit
tests), and cranky AJAX to us; we'll help you come up with tactics,
techniques, and infrastructure to help solve your problems.  This
includes integration with a unit test runner (nose); use of coverage
analysis (figleaf); straight HTTP driver Web testing (twill); Web
recording, examination, and playback (scotch); Selenium and Selenium
RC test script development; and continuous integration (buildbot).
We will focus on techniques for automating your Web testing for quick
turnaround, i.e. "agile" test automation.

Detailed tutorial outline: A 30 minute introduction to the basic testing
       philosophy and tools, followed by discussion and implementation
       details for the individual problems we have chosen.

Presenter bios:

Titus Brown is a CS professor at Michigan State U. and a contributor
to numerous open source projects, including twill, scotch, figleaf,
and nose. Grig Gheorghiu is the Director of Technology at RIS
Technology, a Web hosting company. Grig maintains the Python Testing
Tools Taxonomy wiki page, and he blogs fairly regularly on Python and
agile testing topics at http://agiletesting.blogspot.com.  Together
with Jason Huggins, they are the authors of **An Introduction to
Functional Web Testing with twill and Selenium**.

Previous experience:

Grig and Titus have given two previous testing tutorials at PyCon '06
and '07, with positive results.  They both speak regularly at PyCons
and they are also organizers of the SoCal PIGgies group where they
present regularly.

---

Legacy Comments

Posted by Terry on 2007-11-12 at 23:01.

Idea #1...    So I think the one problem that's always perplexed me is
this:    Say you have:    1) Site A    a) Experience 1    b)
Experience 2    2) Site B    a) Experience 1    b) Experience 2    The
sites are really similar in terms of functionality, the experiences
are really different layouts.     How can I write 1 test to do
something (anything really, click links, etc) but call it in the
following fashions:    - Run for Site A, Experience 1  - Run for Site
A, Experience 2  - Run for Site A, Experience 1 and Experience 2  -
Run for Site A and Site B, All Experiences    Foolishly, I thought
this could be a Nose plugin. According to Jason, that might not be
possible. I'm able to sort of pull it off with some closures but it
doesn't seem elegant.     -----    Idea #2    What about test
configuration? I've been using Fuzzyman's ConfigObj with some decent
success to create configuration files that are helpful for test
suites.    -----    Idea #3    Exposition of the "holistic" Testing
pyramid by Brown/Huggins/Gheorghiu. Examples of how a combination of
how Twill and Selenium attack and solve testing problems differently
but ultimately are excellent tools to use hand-in-hand.

Posted by Doug Napoleone on 2007-11-13 at 00:35.

Sounds like a fantastic Idea to me!  I have a website which needs
testing (though I think that most of it will be done as part of a
sprint if I can swing it ;-)    The schedule system really needs some
help with testing for the ajax stuff so I might just end up going for
it. Complex permission based content can be a real pain.    Any chance
of another testing tools panel?

Posted by Kumar McMillan on 2007-11-13 at 11:58.

What Is the most popular blogging software used on the Internet?
Give Up?    <a href="http://wordpress.org/">spoiler</a>    Since
everyone uses this, even <a href="http://wordpress.org/">Python
hackers</a>, it must be a solidly tested product, right?  THERE ARE NO
AUTOMATED TESTS for this product whatsoever.  It is manually tested by
hundreds of users before rollout.    So, hey, you could always fire up
twill/selenium and start adding some regression tests (you will all be
heroes!).

Posted by Titus Brown on 2007-11-13 at 16:54.

WordPress is an interesting idea. Dr.Project is an idea that Greg
Wilson passed on a while ago, too.    Terry, I have to admit to being
generally confused by your first question.  Could you give me a
concrete example?    I also would say that having us write yet more
tools-for-testing might not be the way to go, given that I can't even
seem to get a 1.0 release out for twill ;)    --titus

Posted by Terry on 2007-11-13 at 22:30.

Everyone's always confused when I bring this up. Even Kumar and Jason!
;)    I'll mock it up.