Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
TestSwarm: Crowdsource your continuous tests for JavaScript
Category: JavaScript, Testing
It has been a pleasure to watch John build TestSwarm and see its alpha release today. It is an ambitious project to help developers get real world testing across browsers. Here you can see it all at work:
John talks about some of the fun challenges:
TestSwarm ended up being a very challenging project to get to an alpha state (and probably will be even more challenging to get to a final release state). Dealing with cross-browser incompatibilities, cross-domain test suite execution, and asynchronous, distributed, client execution has been more than enough to make for a surprisingly difficult project. It’s mostly written in PHP and uses MySQL as a back end (allowing it to run in virtually any environment). Patches will absolutely be appreciated.
And, has a detailed look at the project. This is early days (hence alpha) yet beyond stabilization, John has the vision for some cool features:
- A pastebin-like service where you can drop in code and see the results come back, from many browsers, in real-time.
- IDE integration for sending minor changes out for quick testing.
- Manual testing of user interface code. Pushing manual tests, with instructions, to users for them to walk through.
- Distributing tests to any number of browsers, rather than a specific sub-set. (You could use this to embed a tiny iframe in your site to collect test results from a small sampling of our users.)
- The ability to drive and test browser code or extensions.
What would you like to see?
More resources
- Test Swarm Source Code
- Test Swarm Bug Tracker
- Test Swarm Discussion Group
- Test Swarm Twitter Updates
Related Content:
Why?
@Darkimmortal
Why?
Taking a look at http://wiki.github.com/jeresig/testswarm
“The primary goal of TestSwarm is to take the complicated, and time-consuming, process of running JavaScript test suites in multiple browsers and to grossly simplify it. It achieves this goal by providing all the tools necessary for creating a continuous integration workflow for your JavaScript project.”
In reality it is going to be most useful for people working on javascript libraries. But I certainly would make use of the pastebin-like service when it becomes available.
This is yet again an amazing project from John. If you are not used to, or have not played with, continuous integration servers and such, you mght ask the question why?
However, I can promise you, once you get into continuous integration, you will be absolutely hooked.
OK, so it works on A, B and C but not D, E, F or G.
That’s great information, so what do I do now?
Anyone?
Anyone?