Defining your Test Cases
Your test cases should be based upon the:
- These define required functionality in terms of the interaction between Actors (roles which initiate certain actions) and the system.
- The Use Cases should be defined by the customer.
Detailed Requirements Specification
- All functional and performance requirements should be tested.
The tests should clearly define:
- Prerequisites; these may cover specific systems, configurations or tester experience.
- Steps to be followed; at an appropriate level of detail.
- Expected results.
- Clear criteria for pass or fail.
The prospect of automating test cases is obviously attractive as it can eliminate repetitive tasks.
Manual versus Automated Tests
However, automating test cases is a significant investment, so certain aspects should be considered:
- Require time, effort and experience to setup and configure.
- If browser based, there is an increased risk of problems when browser updates are installed; requiring further time to correct.
- Only really feasible for big projects.
- Good when multiple releases are being generated either for testing or in the long term release plan.
Testing specific aspects
When testing AEM a few specific details are of particular interest:
Author and Publish Environments
Although, covered in Environments it is worth highlighting a deciding factor of AEM with regard to testing.
You must consider AEM as two applications:
- the Author environment This instance allows authors to input, and publish, content. This has a small(er), predictable set of users, for whom specific functionality and performance is crucial.
- the Publish environment This instance presents the website in its published form for access from visitors. This usually has a larger set of users, where the volume of traffic is not always 100% predictable. Performance is still crucial - when responding to requests. Caching and load-balancing must also be considered.
Although the same software as such, they:
- serve different purposes
- have different requirements with regard to functionality and performance
- are configured differently
- are tuned separately
- will each have their own set of acceptance tests
In other words they must be tested separately and with different test cases.
When testing personalization each individual use case should be repeated using multiple user accounts to prove behavior.
Caching must also be checked for correct behavior.
Most projects will install the Dispatcher for caching and load balancing.
Testing is difficult (caching occurs at various levels and in various locations) and must be made on a black-box basis. Key aspects to test for are:
- Accuracy ; ensure that content updates are seen by the website visitor.
- Continuity ; ensure that the website is still available when one server is shut down.
- Clusters Clusters are used to provide:
- Failover If one server fails, then other servers in the cluster will take over processing.
- Performance Load balancing with full failover increases the performance of a cluster.
When used for a customer project the cluster must be tested to confirm correct operation of the configuration.
Testing third-party software
Any third-party software interfaced to AEM will be referenced in the Detailed Requirement Specifications.
Any tests required (dependent on the defined scope) must be analyzed and clean test obtained.