Automated Testing DITA Content and CustomizationsSteven AndersonInformation Architect

@sanderson_sfdc

steve.anderson@gmail.com

What is testing?

Testing is the process of validating and verifying that your

project:– meets the requirements that guided its design and development

– works as expected

What types of testing are there?

Regression testing

Acceptance testing

Alpha and beta testing

How can we meet our test objectives?

Manual testing

Automated testing

What is manual testing?

Visual inspection

Click that link!

Expand the table of contents

What is automated testing?

Use software to run the tests

Compare actual output to expected output

Report on the state of the content or output

Let's learn from software development

Use manual testing only when required

Depend on automated testing

What are the limitations of manual testing?

Time consuming

Error prone

Is that an error or not?

Why is automated testing a good choice?

It gives you confidence that you haven't made that mistake

– again

It scales

It finds unintended side-effects

Automated testing and DITA

With DITA there are three things to test

Content (the input)

The OT itself

The output

How can you test your content?

Schematron

QA plugin

XMLUnit

What is schematron?

A rule based validation language for making assertions

about the presence or absence of patterns in XML trees

Many authoring tools use schematron

http://www.schematron.com/

Demo of schematron in oxygen

What’s the QA plugin?

Created by D.P. Clark and Patrick Quinlan

Identifies errors in DITA tagging, element nesting, language

standards, and common syntax errors

Default tests based on styles in the Microsoft Manual of

Style for Technical Publications

An HTML report is created that includes links to each

project topic file

Tests written in XSLT

http://sourceforge.net/p/qa-plugin-dot/wiki/Home/

Demo of the QA Plugin

What is XMLUnit?

XMLUnit enables assertions to be made about the content

and structure of XML

Based on Junit

http://xmlunit.sourceforge.net/

Demo of XMLUnit

How can you test the OT?

OT regression test suite

JUnit

DITA OT Regression Test

A large number of sample DITA maps and topics

representing a wide variety of content, as well as batch files

to run the content through a build

The output of the test is compared to the output of the

previous working set of code to determine if any tests fail or

if any output changes in a negative way

Mostly useful when customizing, or when upgrading,

versions of the OT

http://dita.xml.org/wiki/regression-testing-in-the-toolkit

Demo of DITA OT Regression Test

How can you test the output?

Link tests

XMLUnit

Browser automation - Selenium, Silk, etc.

Needle and nose

Browser automation

Automate tests using browsers

http://seleniumhq.org/ and

http://www.borland.com/us/products/silk/silktest/

Demo of Selenium

Needle and Nose

Unit testing using Python

Nose is the test framework, needle does the comparison

For testing HTML output

http://needle.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

Demo of Needle and Nose

Samples and code available athttps://github.com/saanvik/Automated-Testing-for-DITA-OT