[OpenLayers-Dev] Automated Testing

[Christopher Schmidt]

Semi-Automated testing is now here.

To throw yourself into the automated testing pool, simply go to:

http://openlayers.org/dev/tests/auto-tests.html?run=all

in IE or FF. (Safari doesn't work at all, and Opera has a number of
failures which I haven't yet debugged.) 

This page will automatically reload every 20 minutes and run again.
(Okay, this is perhaps a bit much, given our current commit rate, but I
haven't yet got it to the point where it can check if the code has
changed and run it again... hopefully I'll get there at some point.)
You can leave your browser open doing this, and it should act as an
'automatic' testing instance. 


The results are posted to http://openlayers.org/test/results.cgi , with
failures getting a seperate HTML page with the total test text, and an
email being sent to the new autotest list: 

http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/autotest

I'm going to work on setting up an IE machine at work to run the tests
-- I haven't actually tested with IE yet -- which would let us get
reports if we commit anything which causes the tests to fail in IE, and
hoepfully get one set up the same in FF.

Next on my list is getting a couple of minor tests running against
single file builds -- the primary thing with those being just to test
that they compiled correctly, rather than that they're providing the
full support of the library. That way, when I commit something that
breaks the build, I can take responsibility for it and fix it.  

And then, of course, there's the need to fix the tests in Opera and
Safari, so we can get testing going on those as well.

I'm working hard to figure out how we can make OpenLayers more resilient
against a slightly less weighty commit process, so that we can open up
development more. For the past several months, the code has not changed
much, and I think a big reason is just the fact that we don't have the
infrastructure in place to make rapid development tenable. I'm hopeful
we can fix this through the use of technology, and accelerate the pace
of OpenLayers development in the process.

If any of this seems like a wrong path to anyone, please feel free to
let me know, and I can back all this out -- there's really not much to
it, but having 'broken the build' several times this weekend, I felt
like I needed to make up for it, and this is my first attempt.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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