Testing is not popular! It is simply boring, and that's the reality!
When we are developing a new XOOPS release, most problems are being reported after the final release, when users start updating their XOOPS installations. The number of alpha/beta testers is unfortunately not very high.
Hopefully, this will change by using Selenium IDE, a very cool extension for Firefox, which allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. You can see it in action in this short video, where I develop some very simple tests for XOOPS Poll:
As you can see, we can develop very standard tests for each module to test their individual features. All these test cases can be then saved as a Test Suite for a particular module.
Once we publish such a Test Suite, individual testers can run these Test Suites in their environment (PHP, MySQL, etc), and report back any bugs that they encounter.
Selenium IDE will help us to reduce the testing time, take away the boring repetitive tasks, and will result in improved quality of XOOPS and XOOPS modules.
Of course, the challenge will be to create those tests.
Hopefully, our users will see the value in creating such tests and will help us with that. These test will show our developers how the modules are actually used, what activities are typically performed and in what sequence.
Please help us by creating these Selenium IDE tests! We'll create then a central library for these tests, so you could download them and test our standard modules, and help us with improving XOOPS and XOOPS modules.
Download Selenium IDE extension (Firefox only): here
