Skip to main content

Continous web testing with Selenium, Maven and Continuum

Wow, nearly a month without posting. I haven't really gotten any good excuses, just lack of stuff to write about, I guess. But for the last week I've been struggling and doing something I find really interesting and useful: Web-testing.

Regular readers will know about my love for Selenium. I still believe that Selenium is the way to go about web-testing.

So, the web application in a project was approaching web-test-worthiness quickly (well, actually it was about a month or two past the point where we should've started doing web-testing). Mind that we were already doing continous integration on the project, so it was only for the reason of not having core-developers breaking any of the stuff being out in the web.

Let me clarify a bit on that last point: Modern web frameworks expose core domain objects way out into the web (like the User.lastName property here in Matt Raible's example).

When core developers refactor Java classes - XML files, property files, JSP files and JavaScript files are not brought along in the equation (especially not in Eclipse).

Breakage caused by these changes will most likely not be discovered in your unit tests. You need web-tests.

There are a number of other good reasons for doing web-testing, like the ever increasing amount of JavaScript in your webapp, and testing the web across different browsers. So web-testing is a Good Thing.

I'm not going to go on about the different strategies for getting continous web-testing implemented. The elements I were after were:

1) Getting Maven to test with Selenium scripts (no, not JUnit tests exported from Selenium IDE)

Now normally, this isn't too hard. Alot of projects out there do web-testing by storing Selenium tests as Java-code - JUnit tests. But the trick here is to get Maven run tests based on tests in the Selenese format - pure html tables with web-browser instructions (they look a bit like Fit-tables).

There is an ant-task for doing this, which in later turns has been converted to a Maven plugin goal: Selenium Maven Plugin's selenese goal. It was originally a seperate plugin called Mavenium, but now the project seems to have been absorbed into the other one.

2) Getting Continuum to run these tests.

Once Maven is running the tests properly, it shouldn't be a problem to get Continuum running these. BUT there's the issue of how the web app should be deployed and started for the Selenium plugin to have something to run on. Cargo was the obvious tool for doing this job, but there were some bumps on the road to getting it working.

3) Getting the tests to run headless

As shown here, with the headless option in the selenium plugin. Anyhow, I ended up not using that plugin-goal, instead just starting Xvfb manually on the Linux box and setting the DISPLAY variable to something like 127.0.0.1:1. Then there was a whole bunch of trouble getting Firefox 2.0 in on Fedora Core 6 and so on.. Yech.

I believe these three requirements have not been met together on many other projects, and this combination has not been properly documented anywhere else. This is perhaps because only recently have the plugins involved matured to such a degree that this process is possible at all. I did try achieving the same goals before the summer, but ran into all sorts of problems with Firefox 2.0 instances not being started correctly and problems using the maven-cargo-plugin.

The closest I ever found was this how-to. But still the example uses Selenium's JUnit test (we want HTML-tests, remember?).

So in the next post I'll put together an example that actually does the whole thing my way. I did run into a couple of problems with cargo that I have not been able to solve (ended up hacking the plugins somewhat), but still the example should work on a general basis. Too tired to make it right now though.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant...
6 comments
Read more

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be...
1 comment
Read more

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Git-SVN Mirror without the annoying update-ref

This post is part of  a series on Git and Subversion . To see all the related posts, screencasts and other resources, please  click here .  So no sooner than I had done my git-svn presentation at JavaZone , I got word of a slightly different Git-SVN mirror setup that makes it a bit easier to work with: In short, my old recipe includes an annoying git update-ref step to keep the git-svn remote reference up to date with the central bare git repo. This new recipe avoids this, so we can simply use git svn dcommit   directly. So, longer version, with the details. My original recipe is laid out in five steps: Clone a fresh Git repo from Subversion. This will be our  fetching repo. Set up a  bare repo. Configure pushing from the fetching repo to bare repo In the shoes of a developer, clone the repo Set up an SVN remote in the developer's repo In the new approach, we redefine those last two steps: (See the original post for how to do the fir...
17 comments
Read more

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --...
12 comments
Read more