Slashdot Mirror
Crowdsourcing JavaScript Testing
snitch writes "John Resig, creator of the jQuery JavaScript library, has released Test Swarm, a platform for distributed continuous integration testing for client-side JavaScript. Frustrated with traditional JavaScript testing environments that don't scale, John's new project, which is currently in private alpha, aims to provide a system for outsourcing browser-related testing to large groups of people or communities."
Crowdsourcing is a bad buzzword that combines the worst of both betas and open source. Far too often "crowdsourcing" is "we want you to find all our bugs for us while we do nothing". By crowdsourcing something you doom it to a perpetual beta while usually not making it fully OSS so it can be really transformed and used.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Def. trendsource
-verb: to solve problems using popular buzzwords
("The developers trendsourced the project by integrating crowdsourcing with Agile methodologies automated with a SOAP communication layer.")
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
If I have to bear witness to another buzzword in a slashdot article title, I will turn Richard Stallman into a Juicer and ship him in a crate to Slashdot HQ. Because nothing says mega-damage like a character from RIFTS. I swear I will. He's already half-way there. You've seen his code, you know he's already got a caffeine drip. It won't be hard. Plus, I'm kinda bloated and cranky right now, so I might just come with. Don't tempt me.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I happen to be working on "A system for euphemising poor coding practices using the latest buzzwords". It'll be awesome!
Seriously, who needs a "crowd" at all? There are only a handful of popular browsers. They'd be much better off running tests in-house until they feel their code is rock solid.
From TFA:
And uploading your code to a public server on every commit and twiddling your thumbs waiting for good samaritans to randomly log in with various browsers and test it for you is...sane?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Javascript 1.5 (aka ECMAScript ECMA-262 Edition 3) is what most developers target for good reason. But there are supersets found primarily in Gecko based browsers. But then you throw in the various DOM quirks between browsers and before you know it, programming anything large in Javascript that will be used across a wide variety of browsers can really start to suck due to minor quirks between different implementations. It will be interesting to see how their test cases support/address layout issues, if they do at all.
Knowing John Resig, I doubt this is vaporware. He's come up with some really amazing stuff and is constantly posting interesting JavaScript tidbits and information for developing real production code on his blog.
Want to get a lot of people to test your Javascript? Call it version one and release it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Before jumping into some gauntlet of distributed (or aggregated or what ever you want to call it) JavaScript testing. Shouldn't there be a FOSS [cross]platform for unit testing JavaScript under multiple "rendering kits/engines" that can be plugged into Rake, TAP or Nose or any other unit testing harness.
For most applications things like Selenium are more trouble or cost to much money then they are worth. I would like to see something that would allow me to test my JS code across multiple browsers with a simple "make test" within my build environment. Of course there are things like JSLint and Rhino etc... but they don't really handle the issue of making the tests easy to write and run (which means dev's will actually write the tests) on top of Rhino not really representing an actual or even a mock of a particular browsers DOM. I don't relish the idea of having to build an special application into my test harness and then direct my browser to a URL in order to run my JavaScript unit tests. There are plenty of systems out there that compile test reports across multiple platforms from a standard harness (CPAN Testers for one). The problem is not test reporting - it's having an easy way to write and run the tests.