[schooltool-dev] Making functional tests less brittle.

[Paul Carduner]

I'd like to add something to the list of future endeavors: better
functional test setup utilities.

At this point we have some helper functions for doctests, like adding
people and logging in.  These are nice because the doctests you write
for other pieces of code don't have to worry about any changes made to
the way you add a person or log in.  I'd like to expand this to
satisfy a number of other common functions:

 - browse to a section/course/person/etc.
 - add instructors/students to a section
 - add people to groups
 - add groups/courses/sections/etc. (I know that courses and sections
are already done)
 - etc.

Each of these could be considered a single unit and it would make
sense to test them in a "unit test" sense (except using testbrowser).

Instead of writing big README.txt files that test all of these units,
we would break up the tests into individual units so they could be
called from other tests as well.  The draw back here is that those big
long README.txt files are really great for getting a general overview
of how things work, and it would be painful to have to open up a bunch
of separate little unit tests for each bit of functionality to get the
big picture view.

Anyhow, does anyone else have thoughts on this.  I don't want to run
off adding a bunch of new functions to
schooltool.app.browser.ftests.setup before having some discussion
about how all these little units might be managed.

- Paul