Beautiful Testing

Into Socialtext

Before I could introduce Socialtext, I needed to introduce our work environment and lay out the fundamental issues involved when we test. At Socialtext, we have a number of different defects, with different root causes, that need to be found (or prevented) using different technical strategies. Without those precepts, we’d be making assumptions about the mission of our team (find bugs? or report status?), our goals (100% automation of all tests?), and what metrics are appropriate (number of tests? statement coverage?).

I did a simple check in the Socialtext Bug database and found the following rough categories of bugs (Table 16-1).

Table 16-1. Defect categories and examples

Category of defect	Â	Examples
Untestable or rendering	9	Exported PDF has incorrect font; widget headers do not preserve padding; tag lookahead does not keep up with typing
Browser compatibility untestable or rendering	9	Workspace pulldown has no scrollbar on IE6
Catchable by computer-based browser execution and evaluation	19	Delete tag; tag does not go away
Catchable by reasonably light slideshow	7	All files list is incorrectly sorted for a complex sort
Special characters, exception-handling, internationalization	13	Special characters (@$==, copyright or trademark, etc.) in fields do not render correctly on save
Appliance installs or upgrades	8	Appliance upgrade fails
Backup, restore, import, export	3	Import of old (<3 releases back) workspace fails
Usability issues	9	Tab order, spelling, too many clicks to use, “make ...