Beautiful Testing

Chapter 19. Reference Testing As Beautiful Testing

Clint Talbert

Automated regression testing is not generally thought to be beautiful. In fact, if automation is successful, it should operate outside of human consciousness; it consists of systems that run thousands of tests after each build without any human interaction at all. Automation is usually associated with the maintenance phase of a well-established project, which is not very sexy. However, when attempting to test web technologies, you find yourself trying to test behaviors and technologies before those technologies have widespread adoption from developers. On the Mozilla project, we are trying to solve this problem by using our automated regression systems as a means for moving regression testing away from its reactive roots to a more forward-looking, anticipatory style of testing.

Our goal is to establish and support openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Internet. We work toward that goal by developing a platform to provide open web technologies in a way that is consistent with the vision of the Internet we wish to create.^[99] The most notable example of our work is the Firefox browser, but there are many other products built from the same base; Thunderbird, Komodo, Miro, and Songbird are some of the more well-known examples. These products enable people to do everything from reading email to playing music to developing other applications, but they all share one core commonality: they are all built atop the Gecko ...