Testing the Wissensplattform

In web-development it is a good practice to write tests, which can run automatically and ensure that a expected behaviour is met. In general testing can be made on different layers of the application and from different viewpoints. Here two tyes of tests are implemented: Unit tests and system tests.

• Unit tests test the functionality of the smallest portions of the code, so called units. These units should meet some expected functionality and are often written from a white-box perspective: That means that the testing person, who writes the test does know the programming code and how the unit works internally.

• a system test checks the system from the outside (from the user-persepective) and assumes the system as a black-box.

For the system tests the selenium webdriver is used. It can be installed by creating a python virtual environment and installing the requirements into that environement. The following commands need to be executed in the terminal:

   cd 02_work_doc/06_seleniumSystemTest

Create the virtual environment:

    python -m venv testingVenv

Activate the virtual environement:

    source testingVenv/bin/activate

Install the requirements:

    pip install -r requirementsTesting.txt

Selenium makes it possible to remote control the web browser through python commands. In that way a user interaction with the site from the viewpoint of a regular user can be made automatically and the results checked against expected behaviour. If firefox is used as a browser, additional software needs to be installed to make the remote controlling possible. That additional software is called geckodriver and can be downloaded from the Mozilla github page: https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases. Download the latest release and unzip it:

    tar -xzf geckodriver.tar

The unzipped geckodriver executable needs to be present in the path of your operating system. Under linux that can be done putting the executable the /usr/bin folder, in which on default is searched for executables.

    sudo mv geckodriver /usr/bin/

Note: Superuser priviliges are needed for that operation. Now, the run-script can be used to execute the integration tests. To execute the script, change the directory to the root-project folder. The integration tests can then be executed by running the following command:

./run test Selenium

Note: Since the application is tested from the outside, it should already be running in a seperate terminal.

On default, the locally running web-application running on http://127.0.0.1:8000 is tested. But it is also possible to test the remotly running web-application (e.g. on https://wissen-digital-ewb.de). To test against that target the environmental variable siteUnderTest needs to be changed. That can be done by providing the new value in the .env-file for siteUnderTest.

If only the integration tests for one specfic site should be executed, that can be done by appending the name of the test-file to the test execution command. E.g. to only execute the test for the Tools site the command looks as follows:

./run test Selenium TestDigitalTools

Note: All test-files can be found under /02_word_doc/06_seleniumSystemTest/Test/Scripts/.

If only one specfic test-method should be executed, it can also be appended to the command. E.g. if only the method testFilteringAndPagination() from the file TestDigitalTools.py should be executed the command has the following form:

./run test Selenium TestDigitalTools testFilteringAndPagination