Hello everybody,
in order to further develop the selenium framework [1], I need to make a few design decisions, especially on coding conventions, which I'd like to discuss on this list, since they affect the way of how extension- and core developers write their tests.
1) Where are the tests located? I suggest for core to put them into maintenance/tests/selenium. That is where they are now. For extensions I propse a similar structure, that is <extensiondir>/tests/selenium.
2) How are the tests organized? Tests are organized in testing suites. Each suite represents a conhesive set of tests. So it is possible to have more than one test suite per extension / core area. Test suites are technically classes. The files should follow this naming convention: <NameOfExtension><[Subset]>TestSuite.php. The subset is optional. For example, in the PagedTiffHandler extension, it would be PagedTiffHandlerTestSuite.php and PagedTiffHandlerUploadsTestSuite.php. This should also be the name of the class. Alternatively, we could use the word "Selenium" somewhere in there in order to be able to divide between unit and selenium tests. In that case I suggest to use PagedTiffHandlerSeleniumTestSuite.php and PagedTiffHandlerUploadsSeleniumTestSuite.php. Hmmm... this gives pretty long names. Any suggestions?
3) How does the framework know there are tests? The tests should be registered with the autoloader in the extension entry file. In core, they should be registered directly with the autoloader.
4) Which tests should be executed? Since Selenium tests are slow, not every test should be executed in each test run. So At the moment, there is a variable $wgSeleniumTestSuites which can be set in LocalSettings.php and which contains the tests that should be run. If things become more dynamically (e.g. when tests should be run on svn commit), there could be a function to add to this variable.
5) Aesthetics... There is an awful lot of "Selenium" in the class names, method names, file names and variable names. It might be a good idea to use "Sn" everywhere except for path names.
Two things need to be kept in mind: * The idea is to use a similar structure for unit- and selenium tests (selenium tests are based on unit tests anyway). I assume at some point, the tests should also be compatible with a continuous integration server. * The wiki that executes the selenium tests is not neccesarily the one that is being tested if the tests run against a selenium grid.
If anybody would like to share their opinion on my suggestions, I'd be very glad!
Regards, Markus
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SeleniumFramework (documentation will be updated soon..)