Our UI tests to this point do not require access to the OSF codebase; but to a running instance of the OSF. This allows them to be run against a dev or staging server instead of only on the developer's local machine.

One of the challenges we've faced is that of keeping our UI tests current with the OSF. With the introduction of unit and functional tests within the main OSF repo, we plan to alleviate this by eventually moving all tests there. To prepare for this, we're cleaning up our tests to use the page object pattern and a set of fixtures representing user actions.

Nose offers several benefits, many of which we're not yet utilizing. As the nose test runner completely supports unittest-based tests, there should be few issues supporting legacy tests while we migrate to use node more fully.

####solr

Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Jetty. Solr uses the Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it easy to use from virtually any programming language. Solr's powerful external configuration allows it to be tailored to almost any type of application without Java coding, and it has an extensive plugin architecture when more advanced customization is required.

Selenium is a tool designed to allow the develop to drive a web browser with code, emulating user behavior. The biggest challenge in doing so has so far been with respect to timing - sensing page refreshes, particularly those driven by clicking a button or executing Javascript.

We've attempted to alleviate this by moving to the page object pattern. A page object represents an individual page of the OSF, exposing properties and methods corresponding to elements on the page and actions that the user might take.

New tests should whenever possible be added to an existing test suite. If you're testing that registrations of a project have a description that matches that of their parent projects, /tests/registrations/test_create.py already contains a test class that creates a project and registers it as appropriate. Since no action is taken in the browser to perform these tests, the registration is created only once, saving significant time.

Use the assertion methods in nose.tools, instead of those provided by unittest. These are PEP8-compliant.

• From localhost
  • Point config:osf_home to localhost:5000
  • Start mongod
  • Invoke solr
  • Start OSF (main.py)
• From development server
  • Point config:osf_home to dev URL
• To run the tests
  • Run one test file: nosetests <testfile.py>
  • Run all test files: nosetests

section pending