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Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 20:30:08 -0700
From: Kelly Campbell <camk@merlot.channelpoint.com>
To: general@xml.apache.org
Subject: RE: Test Infrastructure Project Proposal
Message-ID: <20010210203008.D23813@merlot.channelpoint.com>
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We've been using this type of testing on one of our company's projects for
a while now, and have found it to be one of the most useful and best spent
amounts of time. We're not even doing extreme programming, but having a
good test suite used daily by developers has been an essential part of the
project's success.

I'm wondering what specifically you feel JUnit is lacking? It seems like
writing a whole new infrastructure isn't neccessary. I think adding a
layer on top of JUnit to add specific features we need would be
better. Two good examples of this are HttpUnit and J2EEUnit. I really like
the simplicity, ease-of-use, and integrating tools like the ant task and
HttpUnit that using JUnit would provide.

Another bit of experience I can share is that figuring out how to test
isn't easy. I've been thinking about how we can unit and functional test
FOP because it's such a visual result oriented project. Unit testing is
easier. Functional testing requires some more work in this case. I think
we can take an approach similar to what HttpUnit provides, which is
parsing and access to the resulting HTML programatically which is good for
testing web application functionality, but it's hard to test visual output
from a web browser that way. This testing does require a significant
amount of work up front, but I think it pays off in the end.

Xerces and Xalan are key components that have nothing but programmatic
access, so they should be easier to test this way.

-Kelly
-- 
Kelly A. Campbell              Software Engineer
<camk@merlotxml.org>           ChannelPoint, Inc.
<camk@channelpoint.com>        Colorado Springs, Co.