Automate Acceptance Tests with Hound

Manual acceptance tests are powerful, but they are also cumbersome to run. We performed tests in this chapter that took several minutes to execute, at a minimum, and were prone to error if we missed any of the steps. We can improve on manual acceptance tests by automating them.

Automated acceptance tests are compelling because they let us run hundreds or thousands of acceptance tests without a person being involved. If each acceptance test takes one minute to execute (a very conservative estimate), one thousand tests would take over 16 hours of non-stop testing! It would be extremely costly to cover an extensive application with manual acceptance tests fully. Automated acceptance tests improve on this by being able to run on a dedicated server without a person involved and allowing the fast setup of a test scenario. A thousand automated acceptance tests may run in an hour or less, which is a reasonable amount of time.

In this section, we’ll leverage WebDriver and Hound to write automated acceptance tests. We’ll write tests that feel like standard ExUnit tests but are full-stack acceptance tests. We will not port the manual tests we ran earlier to automated tests. It is possible to port those tests ...