web tech 2012: blackbox/whitebox testing, Jenkins, Puppet, Selenium

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

Black-box testing and White-box testing. Quote:

Black-box testing is a method of software testing that tests the functionality of an application as opposed to its internal structures or workings (see white-box testing).

White-box testing (also known as clear box testing, glass box testing, transparent box testing, and structural testing) is a method of testing software that tests internal structures or workings of an application, as opposed to its functionality (i.e. black-box testing).

Jenkins (software). Quote:

Jenkins is an open source continuous integration tool written in Java. The project was forked from Hudson after a dispute with Oracle, which claims the right to trademark the Hudson name and has applied for such a trademark as of December 2010.

Continuous integration. Quote:

In software engineering, continuous integration (CI) is the practice of merging all developer workspaces with a shared mainline several times a day. It was first named and proposed as part of extreme programming (XP). Its main aim is to prevent integration problems, referred to as “integration hell” in early descriptions of XP. CI can be seen as an intensification of practices of periodic integration advocated by earlier published methods of incremental and iterative software development, such as the Booch method. CI isn't universally accepted as an improvement over frequent integration by supporters of the latter. It is important to distinguish between the two forms as there is disagreement about the virtues of each.

If you hear “eXtreme Programing”, it's voodoo. See: EXtreme Programing and Agile Voodoo .

Puppet (software). Quote:

Puppet, from Puppet Labs, founded by Luke Kanies in 2005, is an open source configuration management tool. It is written in Ruby.

Selenium (software)

Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language (Selenium IDE). It also provides a test domain-specific language (Selenese) to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including C#, Java, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. The tests can then be run against most modern web browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms.