Starter regression test suite powered by CasperJS

I have written about CasperJS in the past, and find it very useful for automating what is normally done by real people. This frees up people to do other things, like making your website more awesome.

A common question I get asked is how do I get started with CasperJS? - this blog post hopes to help everyone get over that initial hurdle, and start writing tests in less than 15 minutes.

Starter framework

So I decided to write a generic framework for websites (CMS agnostic), that anyone can fork and make their own. The code is hosted at https://github.com/seanhamlin/education-smoke-test.

Features

Current feature set includes:

• Environment aware testing, you can easily switch between your test and production site (this is easily extended as well)
• Logs to XML (JUnit compatible) so you can use this with Jenkins for instance
• Cache busting query parameter to all page requests, to ensure you bypass your reverse proxy (Akamai, Varnish etc)
• Optional debug flag for more look into CasperJS’s internals
• jQuery 2.1.4 for simple remote DOM testing - if you can write jQuery to return a boolean, string or integer you can write a CasperJS test for it
• Ignores Google Analytics, so CasperJS does not show up in your statistics (can be extended for other analytics providers as well)
• Takes a screenshot on fail so you can better debug the fail
• Fails on JavaScript errors in the remote DOM
• Abstracts common page tests into globalPageTests(), this enables easy recycling of common tests (e.g. header, footer, HTTP headers etc)
• Tests are structured in a folder, so new tests can be added simply (e.g. for other landing pages)

The Github README goes into more detail on how to install and use the above features.

See it in action

Here is the output from the test suite as it presently stands:

Comments

I am keen to see what other people think about this, and what other features/improvements I could add to it. Please leave my a comment down below, or send me a pull request on Github.