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I usually made php forms and "try" to use "good practices" in them.

I'm concerned about the real safety and error-free of that forms and I want to do some tests simulating the customer behavior, and I do it manually, but I find that is a hard work specially when the form is large and I know that there are a lot of combinations that I can't test, so usually I find bugs in the production phase.

Is there a tool that do this? I listened about Selenium, did somebody use it in the way I need? Or how can I create my own test tools that simulate user inputs at random?

User inputs implies: not filling/checking all the fields, putting in invalid data, using differents setups (no javascript, browser versions, ...), SQL injections, and I don't know so more...

Memochipan
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2 Answers2

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You'll need to consider a combination of approaches here: good test case design, data driving those tests with various input combinations, and an automation tool such as Selenium, WebDriver, Telerik's Test Studio (commercial tool I help promote), or some other automation tool.

Design your test cases such that you're focusing on groups of behavior (a successful path case, a case validating invalid input, a case validating protection against SQL injection, etc.). Then you can look to (perhaps) data drive those test cases with sets of inputs and expected results. You can randomize that as needed through your test case code.

Most good functional automation tools support multiple browsers running the same test script, so that's a good help for hitting multi-browser testing.

Above all, start your automation efforts with small steps and focus first on high-value tests. Don't spend time trying to automate everything because that costs you a lot of time.

Jim Holmes
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Selenium is used to automate browsers in exactly the way you described. Its used for what is called Functional Testing. Where you test the external aspects of an application to ensure that they meet the specifications.

Its is most often combined with unit tests that test the internal aspects. For example to test that your application is safe against different forms of SQL injection.

Each programming language usually has several different frameworks for writing unit tests.

This are often used together this with an approach called test driven development (TDD) where you write the tests before the application code.

max
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