Thursday, June 19, 2008

New Google Gmail Example Illustrates DOM Commands

We've heard from many sources that Google's Gmail application is a very difficult to test reliably. This recently appearing newsgroup posting is one example.

Yes, we agree. The latest Gmail version certainly is a tricky one. And, dropping your testing into the older, pure-HTML version as a way out is certainly not a real solution.

The Google Gmail application is very JavaScript intensive, includes some AJAX type synchronizations, and generally is very sophisticated in its use of both HTML and JavaScript (and AJAX) features.

So we figured, if eValid could do the Gmail application well then that would bode well for eValid use on other, similarly complex web applications.

Our sample Gmail test was to sign on to an existing Gmail account, compose an email message, send it to the same Gmail account, observe that it arrives, then delete the message just recieved. This test sequence is "idempotent" (i.e. cleans up after doing its work and returns everything to the original state), it exercises the main Gmail functions, and it allows us to illustrate a variety of uses of eValid's DOM Element Manipulation/Motion commands.

We put this script through some very stressful playback checkouts. One test was to set up a 100-run sequence using a delay multiplier of 0.1 and that produced normal results. (Lower delay multipliers on a fast driver machine actually played ahead of the Gmail system response time.)

Here is the complete explanation of the Testing Google Gmail With Index/Motion Commands example. There's an important cautionary caveat: In this script if the round-trip test message is sent to the Trash area rather than to the InBox area where it is expected, eValid will -- quite correctly -- see this as an error, a true regression.

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