Sphinx

It is, I suppose, an example of the way that specialists come to take their topic entirely for granted, or at any rate develop certain blind spots: I realised this morning that I have never previously Googled ‘Thucydides’ without any qualifying terms. If I ever had, I’m pretty sure I would have clicked on the third result to show up in the list, which describes its contents as follows: “Thucydides is a tool that lets you use WebDriver-based unit or BDD tests to write more flexible and more reusable WebDriver-based tests, and also to generate …” I have no idea what that means, but was eager enough for an excuse to spend five minutes away from the book – okay, I know that playing on the internet on the PC doesn’t count as a proper break from the laptop – to ferret around in search of the rationale for the choice of name. I think it’s rather sweet…

Thucydides (Thoo-SID-a-dees) is a tool designed to make writing automated acceptance and regression tests easier. It provides features that make it easier to organize and structure your acceptance tests, associating them with the user stories or features that they test. As the tests are executed, Thucydides generates illustrated documentation describing how the application is used based on the stories described by the tests.

Thucydides provides strong support for automated web tests based on Selenium 2, though it can also be used effectively for non-web tests.

Thucydides was a Greek historian known for his astute analysis skills who rigorously recorded events that he witnessed and participated in himself. In the same way, the Thucydides framework observes and analyzes your acceptance tests, and records a detailed account of their execution.

Of course, the obsessive pedant in me now wants to start speculating about whether the Thucydides framework appears to provide a reliable record of the execution of acceptance tests, which can serve as a basis for future practices (kata to hupologistikon, so to speak), but is really manipulating the user according to its own hidden agenda…