Problem/Motivation
No test coverage for the frontend.
Proposed resolution
Use Behat.
Discussed this with Jesse Beach, nod_ and Alex Pott yesterday at Dev Days (Szeged) and we strongly feel we should use Behat to get functional JavaScript test coverage in core. It gives us access to real browsers and phantomjs via mink, the tests are nicely self documenting with gherkin, lots of core developers are already familiar with it via client projects, it's used on Drupal.org etc. etc.
This wouldn't be a replacement for SimpleTest, but likely all the SimpleTests using the browser could be moved over.
There will be things we can't do with Behat, but we can tackle those separately.
Quote from catch's comment at #237566-159: Automated JavaScript unit testing framework.
I'd like to keep this issue clean and at a reasonable amount of comments. Let's file follow-ups for specific topics that needs to be agreed on, that worked very well for the JS meta clean-up.
Realistically we can't get started until we get at least a couple examples of implementation. I'll be talking with a few people this week already, I know jessebeach is as well. If you have a project using behat, please reach out to your closest JS maintainer to talk about it.
Remaining tasks
- Get feedback from projects using behat in the wild and sum that up somewhere.
- Reach out to Behat developers to see if/when they can help us out.
- Agree on how to implement this for core and contrib (where are test files, standards for writing tests, etc.).
- Make d.o testbot run behat tests
User interface changes
N/A.
API changes
Probably none, only additions.
People and groups involved
Drupal.org Infrastructure Working Group
Drupal.org Developer Tools Team
Groups.drupal.org Community Tools Leadership Team