Re: Testing web forms

Hi Alan,

At 12:28 -0800 2004-12-01, Alan Hogue wrote:
>I put up a series of seasonal surveys on the Boalt Hall website and
>am interested in finding something that would allow me to test these
>forms relatively easily. Since I make the forms and someone else
>does the backend, too often we have made something live only to find
>a problem which my manual tests (just submitting fake data a few
>times and looking at what went into the table) did not catch.
>
>Can anyone recommend any software that would help efficiently test
>such forms without requiring a lot of development and scripting?

   There are a number of test frameworks and tools that can simplify
the task of creating your own tests of the scripts or programs behind
your HTML forms - and even of full-blown Web-based applications.

   From a quick Google search, some plausible options include:

   HttpUnit (Java)
   http://httpunit.sourceforge.net/
    or the following wrapper, which considerably simplifies HttpUnit:
   jWebUnit (Java)
   http://jwebunit.sourceforge.net/

   HTTPTest (Perl)
   http://www.anomaly.org/wade/projects/httptest/HTTPtest.html

   SimpleTest (PHP)
   http://www.lastcraft.com/simple_test.php

   At a first glance, all three of these probably lend themselves to
creating useful tests with a relatively small amount of coding.

   In addition, you can find a long list of other such tools, both
free and commercial, at:

   http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html#FUNC

   I haven't personally used any of these testing tools. However,
from a quick scan, one apparent benefit is that many of these tools
are automated: once you've created your tests, you can run them on
demand or on a scheduled basis, and they'll automatically spotlight
any errors, without your having to look at each of the results
returned from your form submissions and make a potentially error
prone manual determination of whether any errors occurred.

   This gives you the freedom to make incremental changes to your
website and then rapidly find out whether anything was 'broken' - and
if so, what broke - following those changes. Testing can also be
valuable in helping you incrementally improve the code that sits
behind your web forms.

   If all you want to do is write a quick and dirty test to submit a
collection of data to your forms and retrieve the results, you could
invoke a command-line utility like cURL <http://curl.haxx.se/> from
your own scripts or programs. However, if you're testing more than a
small set of forms, I'd encourage you to consider the more
full-featured test tools mentioned above.

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group
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Received on Wed Dec 1 13:14:04 2004