smart scheduling for webapp tester

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 6:31 AM, Fetchinson . <fetchinson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I'm looking into a robust solution for web application testing. While
> selenium is great for the actual testing, I'm thinking of a scheduler
> as the final piece in the pipeline. Let's say I have 4 websites that I
> need to test periodically, A, B, C, D. I'd like to be able to define
> things like "run the tests for site A once a day" or "run the tests
> for site B twice a day indefinitely" or "run the tests for site C
> twice a week between now and 2 months from now" or "run the tests for
> site C once a week between May 25 and June 21".
>
> What would be the right scheduling tool for this? I know about the
> standard tools like cron, sched, etc, and first even wrote one myself
> (which became of course unmanagable after a short while :)) but was
> hoping a more sophisticated tool is available.

I'm not sure what you're testing here, so I can't advise on specifics.
If you're testing your application code, it shouldn't need any
periodic testing at all, but if you're verifying an active database,
it may not be necessary to involve your application. Actually, I tend
never to verify database structures; anything that I would consider
testing can get coded as a constraint, so it's enforced by the
database before anything gets committed.

But if you really do need things on a scheduler, I would advise using
your OS's facilities (cron, or equivalent). No need to reinvent the
wheel, unless you want it to do something different. I've written
several simple task schedulers, but always because they do something
fundamentally different from a basic one (like my "Let Me Know", which
checks my calendar and shows me a tick-down until the next significant
event - 27 hours until I host Office Hours, at the moment). To simply
invoke a program every 4:00 UTC, use cron and save yourself the
trouble.

ChrisA