Productive Grails Functional Testing

We all know we should be writing functional (i.e. web) tests for our Grails applications, but this can sometimes seem like too much work for not enough gain. In this talk we'll look at the current Grails plugins that are out there that can start to decrease the development and maintenance cost and make getting the coverage you need more achievable.

Firstly we'll explore the powerful combination of Geb, the Groovy browser automation library, with Spock, the Enterprise ready testing framework, as the foundation for our testing stack. From there we'll discuss how to manage test data sets using the combination of the grails-fixtures and grails-build-test-data plugins. We'll then see how to use the grails-remote-control plugin to get inside your application from your functional tests to configure and how to use the grails-develop-functional-tests plugin to decrease the cycle time when writing your tests.

Finally, we'll discuss strategies for partitioning tests into logical groups and using the remote execution facilities of Geb to have your functional test suite run against multiple browsers and architectures.