Down the Rabbit Hole
Update: there is no form-handling issue with SimpleTest; I made a coding mistake.
Well, well, well. I’ve gone and got distracted. However, it’s a fairly common occurrence for me — when I get started on a project, I know exactly what I want to do, but partway in I find that I’m missing a piece. So, I set the current project aside and start working on the thing I’m missing. Usually, it tends to be a piece of critical infrastructure; in this case, it’s a good, solid testing framework…
I had started writing my own framework about a week and a half ago, and got maybe a week’s worth of part-time work on it before having the bright idea to go hit up the WordPress folks to see if they already had an automated test framework in place. They don’t, but a helpful poster did point me to an example that used SimpleTest. SimpleTest does a whole lot of what I want, but not everything. For one, it’s not designed for WordPress in particular — which is good, but I need a facade for easily performing WordPress actions over and over and over again. Next, it doesn’t have the level of form handling I want; it’s pretty much “set name=value” however you want, with no constraints (other than the named form elements do at least have to exist). I explicitly want to verify that all the form fields are present and accounted for — users have to use the forms, so my test code should have to use the forms, just like a user.
So, what exactly am I working on, these days? Roughly, in order of activity:
- SimpleTest
- Easy-to-handle WordPress test wrapper
- In Series testcases
- Getting In Series 3.0.6 <explitive> shipped already…
- Try and head WordPress in the direction of automated testing
Believe me, folks, I’m really tempted to just release the thing as it stands, right now. I doubt there are any serious bugs left in it, and it’s much better than its predecessors. That said, the last time (well, the last couple of times) I did a release without thorough testing, it really bit me in the ass. I’m trying to learn from that experience, and force myself to make this and all of my future releases better.
In any case, I am still alive and kicking; the direct In Series work is just on hold while I go down the rabbit hole.
