CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2015 E1582 Create integration tests for the instructor interface using capybara and rspec

Intro

Capybara

Capybara is a web-based automation test tool that simulates a real user to follow the scenarios of user stories.<ref>Capybara on GitHub</ref> It could interact with app to receive pages, parse the HTML and submit forms as a user would.<ref>Introducing cucumber & capybara on YouTube</ref> Used with RSpec and Ruby on Rails (version 1.9 or later), capybara makes it easier to write integration tests. <ref>Using Capybara in Rails 3</ref> It is used on the top of an underlying web-based driver and offers a user-friendly DSL (Domain Specific Language) to describe actions executed by the underlying web driver. Such as rack::test, selenium-webdriver and capybara-webkit.<ref>The Basics of Capybara and Improving Your Tests</ref>

In this project, we use capybara with rspec by adding the following line:

 require 'capybara/rspec'

Then put capybara specs in spec/features.

Integration test

Integration test is a software testing definition that we combine modules then test them as one group. It is an important application testing way. It is always adapted after unit testing, we need to combine different units to test the functionalities and verify that the aggregated group could deliver its output properly. The purpose of integration test is to verify the functionality of interface between interacted parts, also we can know performance of the subsystems. The integration testing has two types, big bang top down and bottom up. (1)Big Bang In this type, since all the application is combined with all major usage modules. So we test them under usage model testing, which means we can simulate the users’ acts under testing environment. When doing this, we can test if all the expected components is got when we actually do the same way under production environment. It is an effective way to test the functionalities and got better coverage since we are creating the realistic scenarios. It will make sure the application can have proper output when a user does the same input. (2)Top down and Bottom up Top down and bottom up is another type of integration testing. For top down, we test the top integrated module firstly and test the ranch of it again and again, then we can test all the related modules finally. For Bottom up way, we test the most basic module at first and check the module that containing this basic module. The advantage of it is that we can find the bug easier because we will not miss any branch that we use. However, it is time consuming in this way.

Testing

Based on the project requirements, testing can be divided into the following parts:

T1. Ensure an instructor is able to login to the system.

T2. Ensure an instuctor is able to create a course.

T3. Ensure that the score of a certain assignment can be viewed.

T4. Ensure to view the score of a review.

T5. Ensure to view the score of an author feedback.

T6. Ensure to create an assignment which has two rounds of review, has a topic or does not has a topic, and has a staggered-deadline.

References

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