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.

Comments

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

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

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 --