[dev] Web testing utilities

[Jason M. Felice]

For our internal Horde-based projects, I'd like to start incorporating
some automated web testing.  (I don't believe it replaces actual release
testing, but anything we can catch before humans lay hands on it is a
win.)  We could also systematically test things like XHTML compliance
and alt tags and what not.

I did a little bit of work to look at some tools for our purposes and
try to figure out how to handle this, and I started wondering if this
wasn't something that belongs in the Horde project proper.  So two
questions:

	1) Are Horde people interested in using web testing tools?

	2) Do any Horde developers know of any good ones?

IMO, the requirements are:

 	* that the tool takes a flat, editable text file as input so that we
	  can keep the tests in CVS
	* that what is expected be very scriptable (preferrably PHP), so that
	  we can code web tests for the widest range of cases
	* that it handle HTTP authentication, sessions, cookies, etc.
	* that it runs from the command-line so we can make it part of
	  our internal build/release script.

I'm not suggesting mandatory use of tests, but I'd like to start
using them for our company, and it'd be nice to keep the tests in the
Horde CVS repository, which is not a good idea unless Horde picks a pony.

-- 
 Jason M. Felice
 Cronosys, LLC <http://www.cronosys.com/>
 216.221.4600 x302