Don’t call me DOM

A good part of my work is targetted at developing tools for W3C day to day operations; the most recent ones have been WBS, an application allowing to create and edit questionnaires, to answer them and to collect and present their results, and IPP (standing for Implementation of the Patent Policy), a set of tools to make the application of W3C Patent Policy smoother for everybody.

As I’m more or less convinced of the benefits of having a test suite for any code I write – hey, remember, I’m supposed to lead the Quality Assurance effort at W3C -, I’ve tried to add tests for most of my code as I write it; one part of the code remains pretty much untested, though: the User Interface.

While I make my best at designing user interfaces that I hope make my users life easier (I’m a big fan of usability, whatever this means), I haven’t found yet a good way to ensure that I don’t break a given part of the UI when I make it evolve.

Or maybe I have: Canoo WebTest is a free open source tool for automated testing of web applications, with an especially interesting possibility to test Web applications through their user interface.

I haven’t had time to investigate this fully, but hope to be able to get to it at some point.