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."

Comments

Trendsourcing

[MrEricSir]

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.")

Re:Trendsourcing

[Jurily]

("The developers trendsourced the project by integrating crowdsourcing with Agile methodologies automated with a SOAP communication layer.")

Translation: they got posted on /. and now they're putting out the fire in the server room.

Re:Trendsourcing

[gandhi_2]

The folksomonie's synergistic frision brings a best-in-breed game-changer to the clowns-as-a-service paradigm.

Coincidentally...

[pushing-robot]

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:

100 tests in 12 browsers run on every commit by a human is just insane.

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?

Re:Coincidentally...

[Dynedain]

There may only be a handful of browsers, but that doesn't mean there are only a handful of test cases. When it comes to javascript, there are quite a few variations that can cause problems beyond just the browser name.

One example that I've been specifically dealing with on MooTools involves bugs relating to font antialiasing on Internet Explorer. The issue presents itself on IE 7 when system font smoothing is enabled, but NOT on IE6 or IE8. Furthermore, in only presents itself if the user utilizes "Cleartype" (recommended for LCDs) but not if they use Standard font smoothing. It took me quite some time to narrow down exactly where the problem was.

This isn't an issue on Firefox 2,3, Safari 2,3 (although other kinds of font issues may arise with FF on OSX, and with Safari on Windows). Counting the variations of system settings, major OS and browser versions, that makes for 51 test cases, not including point versions of the OS or browsers, beta versions, and limiting it to the big 3 of browsers.

Re:Coincidentally...

[Dynedain]

Correction, 40 test cases:

Firefox 2,3 on WinXP,WinVista * 3 system font smoothing settings
Firefox 2,3 on OSX
Safari 2,3 on Win2K,WinXP,WinVista,OSX
IE 6, FF 2,3, on Win2k
IE 6 on WinXP * 3 system font smoothing settings
IE 7,8 on WinXP,WinVista * 3 system font smoothing settings

And of course other issues will have larger sets of test cases. I'm able to narrow it down here because Safari has its own font smoothing that is unaffected by which version of Windows it is running on or what the system font smoothing is set to, and Win2k doesn't have any native font smoothing.

Re:private alpha == Vaporware

[acidrainx]

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.