[5 November 2009, some additions 6 November 2009]

I’m using Jeni Tennison’s xspec to develop tests for a simple stylesheet I’m writing. An xspec test takes the form of a scenario along the lines of

• When you match a foo element, do this.
• When you call function bar with these arguments, expect this result.
• When you call this named template, expect this result.

It’s a relatively young project, and the documentation is perhaps best described as nascent. Working from the documentation (it does exist, which makes for a nice change from some things I work with), I first wrote nine or ten tests to describe the behavior of an existing stylesheet; when I ran the tests against that stylesheet, all of them reported failures, because my formulation of the expected results violated various silent assumptions of the xspec code. That might indicate opportunities for making the xspec documentation more informative. I’ve spent an enjoyable hour or two this evening, however, looking at the xspec code and figuring out how my test cases are confusing it, reformulating them, and watching the bars of red in the test report change, one by one, to green. It’s nice to have a visible sign of forward progress.

There are other XSLT test frameworks I haven’t tried, and I can’t compare xspec to any of them. But I can say this: if you are developing XSLT stylesheets and aren’t using any of the available test frameworks, you really ought to look into xspec.

A helpful page about XSLT testing is maintained by Tony Graham of Menteith Consulting. If xspec doesn’t work out for you, check out the other frameworks he lists there.