Notes on Unit Testing

I did a little reading on unit testing, and wanted to document my findings here.

For testing javascript (either in DOM scope or in extension scope) there are many unit testing frameworks. It appears that two of the most popular are qunit and jsunit. Call me superficial, but I took a look at the two sites and decided that qunit showed more signs of modernity and usability, so I'm going to dig into that first. If we hit limits maybe we can look at the other one.

For browser testing involving doing actual browser automation, there are two main frameworks to be aware of: pyauto and browser_tests. The former is in python and the latter is in c(++?). This thread is pretty enlightening as to the history and current state of these in the Chromium development community. They are recommending using browser_tests "from now on," but clearly Python is easier to get off the ground for most mortals.

So... my plan is to get started with qunit. That should allow us to do basic things like navigate the browser to a URL and then check that the URL got added to the list. Later if we want to simulate mouse motion and stuff like that we'll need to get fancier.