Writing Acceptance Tests.md

Writing Acceptance Tests

Business Use Cases and Regulatory Requirements

It's very convenient to begin writing your acceptance tests by looking at the business use cases and regulatory obligations. Behavior Driven Develop (BDD) is very convenient for this. The following example shows the process of converting a Business Feature into a use case and testing scenario.

Feature: Player score can be increased manually

  As a score keeper in some hyperthetical game
  I want to manually give a player five points
  So that I can publicly display a up-to-date scoreboard

  Scenario: Give 5 points to a player
    Given I authenticate
    And "Grace Hopper" has a score of 10
    When I give "Grace Hopper" 5 points
    Then "Grace Hopper" has a score of 15

Converting Use Cases into Tests

Once you have your features, use cases, and scearios defined, begin translating them into acceptance tests, using CoffeeScript, jQuery, and Behavior Driven Development libraries, such as Chai.

Feature: Player score can be increased manually

  As a score keeper in some hyperthetical game
  I want to manually give a player five points
  So that I can publicly display a up-to-date scoreboard

  Scenario: Give 5 points to a player
    Given I can connect to page "http://leaderboard.meteor.com"
    And "Grace Hopper" has a score of 10
    When $("#niftyWidgetButton").click()
    foo = $("#niftyWidgetText").val()
    Then foo.should.have.value(20)

Acceptance Tests Have 3 Essential Key Features

Be aware that most all acceptance testing can be boiled down to three essential features: querying a resource, reading data, and writing data. When it comes to browsers and webpages, these three features basically boil down to the following:

1. Load a webpage or application view
2. Inspect user interface elements (i.e. DOM)
3. Trigger an event / simulate a user interaction

Which, when translated to JQuery (and a bit of Chai), look something like this:

  $(window).open("http://leaderboard.meteor.com");
  $('#niftyWidgetButton').click();
  $('#niftyWidgetText').val().should.have.value(20);

Sometimes, you'll want to adjust the timing of your tests, which is easily done by setting timeouts (in milliseconds).

  $(window).open("http://leaderboard.meteor.com");
  setTimeout(function(){
    $('#niftyWidgetButton').click();
  }, 200);
  setTimeout(function(){
    $('#niftyWidgetText').val().should.have.value(20);
  }, 500);