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I was working with an OASIS-open.org technical committee on a document describing test assertions [1].
The methodology separates the test assertion from the test case(s). The test assertion can be prose. The test cases can make use of XPath (as they do in some cases when the test targets are found in XML instances). A spin
off was Tamelizer and a markup profile it uses called TAML-X. This combined the test assertions and the test case technology so that the test assertions
themselves were executable (using XPath). The examples used in the guidelines included a markup without using XPath expressions but we had a major scenario in mind where the targets would be XML and the assertion
expressions would typically be written using XPath (WS-I test suites which aren't to be confused with previously mentioned WS-* standards). I also do a lot of work with testers writing tests for HTML pages using the very well-known integration test tool Selenium IDE (for Firefox) and that
makes heavy use of XPath even though the target is HTML. Here we end up with many tests which include XPaths which break every time a significant change is made to the HTML. So we have to keep mending the
XPath expressions (even though we try to write them with //, etc, to avoid this). So I know the problem. It doesn't stop people favouring Selenium
IDE for website integration tests though. It's well worth the hassle to many. I guess it might be different if we were using XPath for unit tests but I don't know about that. I guess modern unit tests get associated with TDD
and Agile, so maybe having separate test assertions (written in prose) would be a 'no no' for many unit test writers as it might be seen as going
against Agile mantras. You'd have to update the assertions less frequently than the unit tests but having to update something other than the tests and the XML / code would be just too much for many Agile teams. So
if you wanted to inut test your XML you'd probably be stuck with having to keep revising a load of XPath expressions. It goes with the territory. Best regards Steve ---- Stephen D Green [1] http://docs.oasis-open.org/tag/guidelines/v1.0/cn01/guidelines-v1.0-cn01.pdf
[2] http://code.google.com/p/tamelizer/ On 11 April 2013 09:47, Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka@g...> wrote:
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