1. Automated Testing DITA
Content and Customizations
Steven Anderson
Information Architect
@sanderson_sfdc
steve.anderson@gmail.com

2. What is testing?
 Testing is the process of validating and verifying that your
project:
– meets the requirements that guided its design and development
– works as expected

3. What types of testing are there?
 Regression testing
 Acceptance testing
 Alpha and beta testing

4. How can we meet our test objectives?
 Manual testing
 Automated testing

5. What is manual testing?
 Visual inspection
 Click that link!
 Expand the table of contents

6. What is automated testing?
 Use software to run the tests
 Compare actual output to expected output
 Report on the state of the content or output

7. Let's learn from software development
 Use manual testing only when required
 Depend on automated testing

8. What are the limitations of manual testing?
 Time consuming
 Error prone
 Is that an error or not?

9. Why is automated testing a good choice?
 It gives you confidence that you haven't made that mistake
– again
 It scales
 It finds unintended side-effects

10. Automated testing and DITA

11. With DITA there are three things to test
 Content (the input)
 The OT itself
 The output

12. How can you test your content?
 Schematron
 QA plugin
 XMLUnit

13. What is schematron?
 A rule based validation language for making assertions
about the presence or absence of patterns in XML trees
 Many authoring tools use schematron
 http://www.schematron.com/

14. Demo of schematron in oxygen

15. What’s the QA plugin?
 Created by D.P. Clark and Patrick Quinlan
 Identifies errors in DITA tagging, element nesting, language
standards, and common syntax errors
 Default tests based on styles in the Microsoft Manual of
Style for Technical Publications
 An HTML report is created that includes links to each
project topic file
 Tests written in XSLT
 http://sourceforge.net/p/qa-plugin-dot/wiki/Home/

16. Demo of the QA Plugin

17. What is XMLUnit?
 XMLUnit enables assertions to be made about the content
and structure of XML
 Based on Junit
 http://xmlunit.sourceforge.net/

18. Demo of XMLUnit

19. How can you test the OT?
 OT regression test suite
 JUnit

20. DITA OT Regression Test
 A large number of sample DITA maps and topics
representing a wide variety of content, as well as batch files
to run the content through a build
 The output of the test is compared to the output of the
previous working set of code to determine if any tests fail or
if any output changes in a negative way
 Mostly useful when customizing, or when upgrading,
versions of the OT
 http://dita.xml.org/wiki/regression-testing-in-the-toolkit

21. Demo of DITA OT Regression
Test

22. How can you test the output?
 Link tests
 XMLUnit
 Browser automation - Selenium, Silk, etc.
 Needle and nose

23. Browser automation
 Automate tests using browsers
 http://seleniumhq.org/ and
http://www.borland.com/us/products/silk/silktest/

24. Demo of Selenium

25. Needle and Nose
 Unit testing using Python
 Nose is the test framework, needle does the comparison
 For testing HTML output
 http://needle.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

26. Demo of Needle and Nose

27. Samples and code available at
https://github.com/saanvi