[development] Drupal and acceptance testing

[Charlie Gordon]

Caleb Gilbert wrote:
> So far all documentation and comments I can find on Drupal.org seem to 
> give the impression that the Drupal project/community-at-large is 
> taking the stance that simpletest should be used for acceptance 
> testing (please correct me if I'm wrong). This, however, would be 
> counter to simpletest's own documentation which suggests to look at 
> other solutions for acceptance testing: http://simpletest.org/api/ 
> (bottom of page)

The Drupal SimpleTest module has progressed far beyond the original 
SimpleTest we started with - we now have a more powerful, although 
Drupal-specific testing framework which still retains the somewhat 
misleading name "SimpleTest" (there's an issue somewhere to rename 
SimpleTest to testing). We currently do have both functional and unit 
tests working under the current framework - although javascript tests 
currently remain impossible, although there are several issues 
addressing that point (feel free to help!).

But basically, our Drupal-specific extension of SimpleTest meets our 
needs for functional testing and unit testing so well, I don't think 
there's really any point to looking into other harder-to-install 
automated testing tools - they'll never be used by a sizable percentage 
of the Drupal community, whereas the SimpleTest module for Drupal 
requires very little in order to function properly. The current 
framework covers the vast majority of our testing needs; the tests are 
lagging far behind the testing framework here. We don't really need to 
rethink our framework or consider other frameworks until we've reached 
the limit of what the current framework can do. JavaScript tests would 
certainly be nice, but should we really worry ourselves with them when 
much important core php code remains entirely untested?

-Charlie