Testdown: browser smoke testing made easy

Testdown is a kind of QA robot that clicks around in your web app, following simple instructions to verify that the thing basically works.

You provide instructions in plain English. The following paragraph is an example.

Enter "banana" into the recipe search box. Wait. See some recipes. Click the recipe "banana smoothie". Look at the recipe pane. See some ingredients. See some ingredients: "banana", "peanut butter", "honey".

This approach promotes a simple kind of medium-level smoke testing that we think is valuable in addition to more rigorous testing. You can quite easily define a suite of basic tests formulated from the perspective of user expectations.

To make that paragraph work as a test for your recipe app, you only need to annotate the component nodes with a "role" attribute, like <article data-role=recipe>, and so on for each concept.

Giving definite names to user interface concepts has several benefits. Tests become cleaner from not being cluttered with arcane selector syntaxes, and by writing tests on this semantic level, you avoid coupling the suite to implementation details. Plus, it can help with establishing a ubiquitous language for talking about interface components.

Documentation

Will write more here...