WatiN - what to test?

Question

I have been writing a lot of unit tests for the code I write. I've just started to work on a web project and I have read that WatiN is a good test framework for the web.

However, I'm not exactly sure what I should be testing. Since most of the web pages I'm working on are dynamic user generated reports, do I just check to see if a specific phrase is on the page?

Besides just checking if text exists on a page, what else should I be testing for?

Answer 1

First think of what business cases you’re trying to validate. Ashley’s thoughts are a good starting point.

You mentioned most pages are dynamically generated user reports. I’ve done testing around these sorts of things and always start by figuring out what sort of baseline dataset I need to create and load. That helps me ensure I can get exactly the appropriate set of records back in the reports that I expect if everything's working properly. From there I’ll write automation tests to check I get the right number of records, the right starting and ending records, records containing the right data, etc.

If the reports are dynamic then I’ll also check whether filtering works properly, that sorting behaves as expected, etc.

Something to keep in mind is to keep a close eye on the value of these tests. It may be that simply automating a few tests around main business use cases may be good enough for you. Handle the rest manually via exploratory testing.

Answer 2

You essentially want to be testing as if you are a user entering your site for the first time. You want to make sure that every aspect of your page is running exaclty the way you want it to. For example, if there is a signup/login screen, automate those to ensure that they are both working properly. Automate the navigation of various pages, using Assertions just to ensure the page loaded. If there are generated reports, automate all generations and check the text on the generations to ensure it is what you specified by the "user" (you). If you have any logic saying for example when you check this box all other boxes should check aswell. There are many assertions that can be applied, I am not sure what Unit-Testing software you are using but most have a very rich assortment.