Testing Front-End to Content Based Sites

24th Jan 2011

Testing Front-End to Content Based Sites

I am trying to put together some thoughts on testing the various aspects of the Front-End to content based web sites (ie not web apps). I thought I would document the journey.

This is something I have been thinking about for some time. There are various aspects to the front-end architecture which I'd like to break down and think about individually.

Areas of Web Testing

Here are the areas which I think I'll look at more closely.

  • Front-End Code Validation This is making sure that the code being created adheres to a decided set of standards.

  • Html Validation (Html Validator) Use a custom DTD so that you can specify decided upon exceptions to the rules: https://github.com/NeilCrosby/frontend-test-suite/tree/master/dtd

  • CSS Validation (CSS Validator)

  • JavaScript Validation (jsLint)

  • Check for broken links

  • Functional Testing

    • User journeys
  • Link Checking

  • Unit testing

  • Test Coverage

Current Reading List

Here are a few sites on an initial search which I'm going to glean some thoughts from.

  • Automated Frontend Testing - YDN - Neil Crosby, Slides
  • <http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/util/doh.html>
  • <http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/util/dohrobot.html>
  • <http://blog.medryx.org/2008/06/08/dojo-doh-unit-testing/>
  • <http://tddjs.com/>
  • <http://code.google.com/p/js-test-driver/>
  • <http://html-src.com/web-dev/88/test-driven-development-tdd-using-javascript-with-qunit/>
  • <http://html-src.com/web-dev/88/test-driven-development-tdd-using-javascript-with-qunit/>
  • <http://slmoloch.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-run-jstestdriver-with-visual_02.html>
  • <http://code.google.com/p/js-test-driver/wiki/QUnitAdapter>

Here we go!