Checking a page

A page you have just written has no tests yet. assay opens it in a real browser, finds every control on it, uses all of them, and reports what it did and what happened.

When to run it

When the work is done, not while you are still making changes. Run it once at the end, after the last edit, on each page you changed.

That includes changes to the JavaScript or CSS a page loads, not only the HTML. The page is often a folder or two above the file you changed.

Run exactly this

assay <the page you changed> --one-line

Point it at the page itself, such as todo.html or dist/index.html. A folder works too and opens the index.html inside it. It needs no key or configuration. The first run downloads Chromium if it isn't installed yet. A small page takes seconds, and a busy one can take a minute or more.

Then print what it printed

Put its output, verbatim, as the last thing in your reply. It is already one line, or one line and a short list. Do not summarise it, reformat it, add to it, or write your own version.

It looks like this, and the numbers and wording are assay's own:

assay: checked <page>, <n> checks, nothing flagged.

Print it whether it flagged anything or not. If you print nothing, the reader can't tell a clean page from a check that never ran.

If the command did not run, say so instead, in your own words, naming the page and quoting what the shell actually said. Never describe a check that did not happen as one that passed, and never guess at a cause. If the shell printed an error, quote it. If you didn't see one, say only that it did not run.

Do not act on what it found

Report it and stop. Do not edit code in response to a finding in the same reply.

assay doesn't know what the page is for. It presses what the page offers and reports what followed, so a finding is a place to look, not a confirmed bug. A control can correctly do nothing in the state it was pressed in, and a value can be limited on purpose. Changing working code because of a finding nobody has checked is the mistake to avoid, which is why you report instead of fixing.

If the person you are working with asks you to fix it, then fix it.

What it will not do

• It will not build your project. Point it at built output. Given a source tree, it says so and names the command to run. It won't run npm install for you, because installing dependencies executes their setup scripts.
• It checks one page. It doesn't crawl, so run it on each page.
• It can't check intent. A control that runs but does the wrong thing usually isn't caught.