Re: [cgiapp] CGI::Application Testing Methodologies

[suppressed]

> My advice would be to factor your code such that the code is
> separated into a testable module.

     This is excellent advice.  Try and write your 'back end'
     modules so that a browser is not needed to exercise them.
     Then for testing you write a simple script that can be
     executed from the command line to fully test all of the
     services provided by your module.  It then becomes a much
     simpler matter to create a test script that probes all of
     the expected operations as well as the boundary conditions
     and even pathological cases.  In other words, don't assume
     that service will always be given sane data from the front
     end.  Test for possible inputs that "should never happen".

     The book cited earlier will help you write those command
     line test scripts in a very efficient manner using well
     established and vetted test harness modules.

     An added benefit to this approach is, when you later have to
     make a change to one of these modules, you can run your
     tester to make sure you didn't accidentally break something
     else in the process.

     In this way testing the final app itself should be more
     about usability testing with humans rather than actually
     trying to test the correct functioning of lower level
     functions through the app's web interface.

                                                    ...BC

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