Testing Products for Web Applications?

hellbunnie asks: "I work with a team of developers many of whom spend much of their time writing web-based front-ends for DBs or other applications. Now, while we enjoy programming, we're pretty lazy when it comes to testing. Even if we weren't so lazy, I think we'd still miss a number of problems, 'cos there's just so many different screens that use any particular method/function that you might change. That means there's a lot to be tested after each change. So, my question is has anyone any experience with automated systems for testing web applications?"

"I've seen a lot of automated test suites advertised and I've always assumed that they were no substitute for careful testing by a human. However, as the number of web pages that we need to maintain grows, I've begun to wish that we had something that we could kick off at night, that would follow all links on our system and fill in values for the various forms it encountered, then when we arrived in the next morning there'd be some sort of report available detailing its findings. It could flag any pages that returned something obviously incorrect, such as a SQL error, a blank page or just the word 'error'.

Does such a thing exist or am I just engaging in wishful thinking to imagine that there might be something flexible enough to do the job? What do other people do to test their software?"

Comments

If you didn't already know about it...

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

Web Application Stress Tool (freebie from M$)

http://webtool.rte.microsoft.com/

Cactus or HTTPUnit

[revscat]

Both Cactus and HttpUnit allow you to do unit tests on web components. Both are extensions of JUnit. Cactus allows you to do unit tests of servlets and JSPs, while HttpUnit allows for unit tests of the resulting HTML code. (Cactus also integrates HttpUnit to a certain degree.)

Obviously, these tools are targeted at Java development. I have less experience with HttpUnit than with Cactus, but I imagine it could be used as a general test suite.

many open source test frameworks available

[consumer]

My experience with commercial load-testing apps is that they are outrageously expensive, a pain to program, don't really scale all that well, and mostly have to run on Windows with someone sitting at the mouse. There are some that work better than others, but the free stuff in this areas is quite good.

I recommend httperf and http_load for banging on lists of URLs really hard. At one place I worked, one of our developers rigged up some shell scripts that would play back log files through httperf and that worked pretty well.

If you want to record browser sessions for testing specific paths through the site, look at http-recorder or roboweb. There's also webchatpp, HTTP::WebTest, and HTTP::MonkeyWrench on CPAN. More info on this can be found on the mod_perl mailing list or on PerlMonks.