Shortcut ways to capture coverage tests of existing website behavior?

locked_user sundialsvc4 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Let’s say that I have a website that I want to change, and let’s say that the aforesaid website is a beast. One of the very first things that I would want to do with such a monster is to capture, in a repeatable and testable way, “what the site is doing now.” (This as a basis for regression testing from a user-facing perspective, e.g. with WWW::Mechanize and WWW::Scripter and (what else?.)

Okay, okay. I know that this will not be a “cookie-cutter, done in five minutes” process, nor would I wish it to be. What I want, is simply to squeeze as much drudgery out of the test-building procedure as I can, and also to attain as much coverage as I can (so that something is not left un-covered just because my eyes had completely glazed over). The computer is great at doing repetitive tasks, exhaustively and without complaint, and I can pick-and-choose from whatever it spews out.

Esteemed Monks, what are this penitent’s options and best practices?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Shortcut ways to capture coverage tests of existing website behavior? by Corion (Patriarch) on Mar 27, 2011 at 16:10 UTC
HTTP::Recorder is a proxy that records your clickstream. Alternatively, you can get quite some mileage from WWW::Mechanize::Firefox::DSL, but that still means you need to manually write the tests.	[reply]
Re: Shortcut ways to capture coverage tests of existing website behavior? by marto (Cardinal) on Mar 27, 2011 at 18:35 UTC
Hi, firstly I'd like to point out that I've never used this method, I believe Selenium provides recording scripts for playback later. See Using WWW::Selenium To Test Or Automate An Ajax Website for (way) more detail.	[reply]
Re: Shortcut ways to capture coverage tests of existing website behavior? by bluescreen (Friar) on Mar 27, 2011 at 19:06 UTC
One option you might want to pursue as a quick win if your server is apache is JMeter. The beauty of it is that you can use Apache's access_logs as the input and it simulates the traffic to your application and perform assertions on the results ( status code, page size, ...). This would serve more as an smoke testing but you can deploy that in minutes without much effort. There is a caveat tough which is the fact that POST content doesn't get recorded in the access_logs so you won't have coverage there.	[reply]