The Testomato Basic Test Suite

The Testomato team wants to make sure you understand how our features work, so this post will be the first of a Feature Spotlight series. Today, we’ll cover how we create our basic test suite (a set of tests) when you test a URL.

The automatic test suite we create is based on a link search we conduct on your homepage.

What does that mean? When you send us the URL for your website,  Testomato finds all the hidden links in the HTML on your homepage, identifies important links, and makes sure they are all functioning correctly.

Curious how we get a basic Testomato test suite like the one below?

Let us explain.

How we create our basic test suite:

1. The first test we add to the suite is your homepage (taken from the URL you sent us).

2. On your homepage, we ignore any links that take visitors away from your personal website (don’t worry, we pay attention to subdomain links e.g. blog.”awesomedomain”.com”).

3. Next, we sort links by the length of the link text and take the 8 shortest. Why? The most important links within your website usually have the shortest names e.g. “About”, “Contact”, “Buy”, etc. These 8 links are added with basic settings to the test suite.

4. We then add 3 more tests automatically:

• 404 Not Found Error: We make sure that your server will respond correctly with a 404 HTTP status code by creating a non-existent link on your homepage.
• Favicon Icon: We check to make sure your favicon (the small icon found in the browser next to URLs) can be found.
• robots.txt Test: We test this important file to make sure that web crawlers (like GoogleBot) from search engines can get all the information they need to index your website properly.

5. Finally, we add form tests, which are created to test that any forms you have on your website are functioning). We try and detect all HTML <form> </forms> tags and create a test for each form we locate. These tests show up as a gray test box. Once you add the params you need checked, we’ll send POST commands to your form – in simple terms: we test the form as if we were one of your visitors filling in the form and pressing Submit.

The end result? 

A 12+ test suite that will run hourly. If we find any problems, we’ll send you an e-mail ASAP!

Now, a moment of truth, since our team wants to keep you up-to-speed on our progress. We’re not perfect (who really is?) and we want to make sure you know that our form detection is not exactly where we’d like it to be.

Our forms detection has a few flaws:

• We do not detect Javascript forms
• Naturally, we can’t beat CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery)
• Some forms are not displayed correctly because they are too complicated
• We can’t always identify the name of the form correctly (i.e. Your test will show up with the name – Form: “Your URL”)

This part of the application is still in its early stages, but we are working hard to fix these problems – so we appreciate your understanding, support, and most of all, patience!

Did you find this post helpful? Tell us about it! Please leave us a comment below or on Facebook, or you can always tweet us @testomatocom.