TEST DETECTIVE

Proper test logging is a crucial part of our framework setup. As long as your plan is green then everything is good, but have you ever tried to analyse test failures on CI server with no logs or test traces? Good practice is to log every important step of your tests, so that one could read our logs and understand test logic. In previous tutorial we went through setting up new Protractor project from scratch . If you run your test, you would noticed that Jasmine’s default test output to console is rather poor. In this post we would configure more verbose and user friendly console logging from our tests. Our goal  If you’ve followed basic protractor project configuration, after running your tests you will see something like: Basically what you get out of the box is dot for every it(). Well yes, not exactly the most user friendly output, not the most informative one neither. What we want to see are logs like those below: Jasmine Spec Reporter  Sin...

Web development is easily one of the fastest changing field of software engineering. When comes to web application’s functional testing, there is one king – Selenium Webdriver. It has been in use for about a decade and it’s still greatly popular. With demand for fast and reliable single page app’s development framework, Angular’s become first choice for majority of new web projects. Although Selenium Webdriver is still great tool for testing Angular applications, it falls short in some framework-specific aspects. Developers and community behind Angular framework quickly realised that and came out with their own implementation of Selenium Webdriver – Protractor, an end-to-end testing framework, written on top of WebdriverJS. Protractor runs test agains your application in browser, simulating real user. With this post I want to start a new tutorial series on my blog. In next few posts we will go from bootstrapping new project, through popular patterns and some advanced confi...

In my last post I wrote about creating Selenium Grid with use of Docker. I’ve received some questions about customising node’s containers – by default, Docker containers for Selenium Grid nodes run only one instance of browser per node. It’s important to understand that running Grid on Docker is slightly different approach than running it alone – instead of building huge Grid with multiple nodes and dozens of browsers, you run few smaller, independent machines. If one machine is down – you throw it away and build another one. Great use case of Selenium Grid with Docker is to build Grid’s machines as a self service for teams in your company, or to build it automatically before automated tests trigger, and destroy it after.  Nevertheless, it is possible to tweak default node’s conteiners, so they would contain more browser instances. In this post we’ll create container with custom Selenium Grid’s node configuration – our container would provide more than one instance of browser....

Selenium webdriver on it’s own, or with it’s implementation, like Geb is arguably the most popular solution for testing web-based applications. Besides all it’s greatness, it has some flaws. Selenium tests are slow, and it’s cost of maintenance is big. The answer for the first issue is distributed testing with Selenium Grid, which I described previously.  From the DevOps perspective though, setting Selenium Grid configuration like that is highly over-expensive and non-scalable. The answer for this can be Docker with it’s docker-compose tool. In this post we will try to create vm provisioned by docker-compose and set up scale Selenium Grid. All of this will be run with one command. What is Docker  In simple words, Docker – with use of linux-containers – allows you to pack all your application dependencies, like database, system libraries and so on, into standardised and portable units, called containers. The main difference from virtualization tools like vagrant, is ...

In a previous article I described a set of best practices for designing automated tests. So as I said, in this post I would like to expand our toolbox of two design patterns, that work great with selenium tests. In this post we will dig into Page Object pattern and combine it with Page Factory. As always, whole code for project is available on my github.  Page Object  Pattern Page Object is a concept that helps to reduce the number of duplicated code, and helps with test maintenance, resulting from changes in the structure and functionality of the web application. The main idea behind page object is to place the code relating to the functionality of subpages in separate classes. In a very simplified way, if your web application includes pages: home about contact We should create three separate page object classes:  Home.java  About.java  Contact.java  Each class should contain only those methods that support functionality for ...

Selenium WebDriver is a great and powerful tool when it comes to web test automation. The pros would be appreciated by everybody who test web based applications. However, along with the enlargement of our test base, there are some limitations, and use of single WebDriver implementation on the local machine becomes insufficient. The answer to this problem can be Selenium Grid tool, which distribute tests execution to remote machines. What is Selenium Grid and why use it?  Selenium Grid allows you to perform tests execution on different machines, with multiple browsers and operating systems at the same time, regardless of the local development environment. It creates a central hub, which distributes the execution to remote nodes.  Grid architecture consists of one hub and one or more nodes. Hub is placed on the single machine (local or remote). It is the central point which distributes tests to nodes, depending on configuration and accessibility. Nodes are machine...