I am working on the automation of test cases with the Cucumber JVM 1.2.2 framework and Selenium. Each test case corresponds to a Feature file.
I have multiple Features files organized in folders, and I need to be able to define the order of execution through a text file. For example, the text file can be like this:
file3.feauture
file1.feature
file5.feature
file2.feature
file4.feature
At this time the execution is called through a tag that is placed in the files that will be executed.
First of all, the version you are using is very old. We are currently on 4.7.4 (see: https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm).
Note that the group-id changed from "info.cukes" to "io.cucumber" with v2.
Second of all, it is recommended to have your tests be independent of each other.
From the Cucumber FAQ:
"Each scenario should be independent; you should be able to run them in any order or in parallel without one scenario interfering with another.
Each scenario should test exactly one thing so that when it fails, it fails for a clear reason. This means you wouldn’t reuse one scenario inside another scenario.
If your scenarios use the same or similar steps, or perform similar actions on your system, you can extract helper methods to do those things."
Cucumber Ran the feature file in Alphabetical order.
Rename your feature file like :
Cfile3.feauture
Afile1.feature
Efile5.feature
Bfile2.feature
Dfile4.feature
Related
I am completely new to Karate and had a question regarding the karate-config.js file.
I understand it is the first to run as "config" for all the scripts- sort of global settings.
What I have written are a few test cases that require different "setup" steps that cannot be done in the Background (what I understand runs after karate-config.js) for each test scenario.
I have two Feature files with scenarios in them. One of the feature file requires this setup from the karate-config.js. The other Feature file doesn't. Right now the setup is running for both Feature files when I only want it to run for the first one.
I was thinking I could tag each Feature file with a unique tag and use an If statement in karate-config.js to only run if this tag is present. However, that likely won't work since the Feature files don't get accessed until after karate-config.js is traversed right?
Is there a way to get this done?
Sorry if the description is long.
I think you are overcomplicating things. If something is not to be used in all features, please don't put it in karate-config.js.
Just go with the strategy of having 2 re-usable features and call them in the Background where needed. This is what is done in normal programming languages, and Karate in that regard is no different.
You seem to be trying to save one line of code being repeated in multiple files. My advice: don't.
Below is the structure how my Feature Files are divide. I have created Folders based on the functionalities and then added the scenarios inside them.
Now, I have to tag few test cases among them as Smoke Test cases and get them executed.
The point here is I need a specific order for that as in eg
Add Asset
Run Test
Schedule Test
Delete Asset
Since I will add something first and then work on it and delete it at the end
I know by default Cucumber executes test cases alphabetically but that would not solve my problem.
How can I achieve that?
I am using Java
Cucumber features/scenarios are run in Alphabetical order by feature file name.
However, if you specifically specify features, they should be run in the order as declared. For example:
#Cucumber.Options(features={"automatedTestingServices.feature", "smoketest.feature"})
You can achieve by setting priority or dependency, supported in QAF which is TestNg implementation for BDD. Setting priority with scenarion should do the needful for example:
with QAF scenario in DeleteAssets.feature may look like below:
#priority:100
#or you can set dependencies like below
##dependsOnGroups:['create','schedule']
#delete #otherGroup
Scenario: Delete existing Asset
Given ...
Note: gherkin syntax doesn't supports meta-data so you need to use either qaf bdd or bdd2 syntax and appropriate factory to run tests.
Yes, you can set a priority in cucumber scenarios. but not for the whole scenarios we can do that. inside methods we have declared in step definition file, can achieve that. Just put a keyword "Order" in the step definition file over the method based on the order of the method it will run as priority.
Click here for reference
NUnit (and the like) has method attributes which allow tests to be run multiple times with different arrange values. Is something similar possible with SpecFlow?
What I am aiming for is a way to run the same scenario tests in a feature file with as many browser drivers as I can, in one test run.
You can use scenario outlines. In example of scenario outline you can mention driver name and you code logic should take action according to driver. Please see more details about scenario ouyline below
https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber/wiki/Scenario-outlines
Examples are one solution, but in your case a little cumbersome, as you have to specify them at every scenario.
In your case, please have a look at the targets feature of the SpecFlow+Runner. With that you can "multiply" your scenarios for different configurations. If you put the web driver that should be used in this configuration, you can test as many webdriver as you want.
Have a look at this example: https://github.com/techtalk/SpecFlow.Plus.Examples/tree/master/SeleniumWebTest
Full Disclosure: I am one of the developers of SpecFlow & SpecFlow+
Use scenario outlines and this tool if you want to use browsers as tags:
https://github.com/unickq/Unickq.SeleniumHelper
We are switching from a classic 'Waterfall' model into more Agile-orient philosophy. We decided to give BDD a try (Cucumber), but we have some issues with migrating some of our 'old' methodologies. The biggest question mark is how manual tests integrates into the cycle.
Let's say the Project Manager defined the Feature and some basic Scenario Outlines. With the test team, we defined around 40 Scenarios for this feature. Some are not possible to automatically test, which means they will have to be tested manually. Execute manual testing when all you have is the feature file, feels wrong. We want to be able to see past failure rate of tests for example. Most of the Test-Cases managers support such features, but they can't work with Feature files. Maintaining the Manual Testcases in external Test-Case manager, will cause never-ending updating issues between the Feature file and the Test-Case manager.
I'm interested to hear if anyone is able to cover this 'mid-ground' and how.
This is not a very unusual case. Even in Agile it may not be possible to automate every scenario. The scrum teams I am working with usually tag them as #manual scenario in the feature file. We have configured our automation suite (Cucumber - Ruby) to ignore these tags while running nightly jobs. One problem with this is, as you have mentioned, we won't know what was the outcome of manual tests as the testers document the results locally.
My suggestion for this was to document the results of each iteration in a YML or any other file format that suits the purpose. This file should be part of the automation suite and should be checked in the repository. So to start with you have results documented along with the automation suite. Later when you have the resource and time, you can add a functionality to your automation suite to read this file and generate a report either with other automation results or separately. Until then your version control should help you to track all previous results.
Hope this helps.
To add to #Eswar's answer, if you're using Cucumber (or one of it's siblings), one option would be to execute the test runner manually and include prompts for the tester to check certain aspects. They then pass/fail the test according to their judgement.
This is often useful for aesthetic aspects e.g. cross-browser rendering, element alignment, correct images used, etc.
As #Eswar mentioned, you can exclude these tests from your automated runs by tagging them.
See this article for an example.
Test cases that cannot be automated are a poor fit for a cucumber test. We have a bunch of these edge cases. It is nigh impossible to get Selenium to verify PDF documents well. Same thing for CSV downloads (not impossible, but not worth the effort). Look and feel tests simply require human eyes at this point. Accessibility testing with screen readers is best done manually as well.
For that, be sure to record the acceptance criteria in the user story in whichever tool you use to track work items. Write a manual test case. The likes of Azure DevOps, Jira, IBM Rational Team Concert and their ilk have ways to record manual test plans, link them to stories, and record the results of executing a manual test.
I would remove the manual test cases from the cucumber tests, and rely on the acceptance criteria for the story, and link the story to some sort of manual test case, be it in a tool or a spreadsheet.
Sometimes you just need to compromise.
We use Azure DevOps with Test Plans + some custom code to synchronize cucumber tests to ADO. I can describe how we’ve realized it in our projects:
We start with the cucumber file first. Each User Story has its own Feature file. The scenarios in the Feature are the acceptance criteria for the story. We end up with lots of Feature files, so we use naming conventions and folders to organize them.
We annotate the top of the Feature file with a tag to the User Story, eg #Story-1234
We‘ve written a command line utility that reads the cucumber files with these tags. It then fetches all the Test Suites in the Test Plan that are linked to Stories. In ADO, a story can only be linked to a single test suite. If a Test Suite doesn’t exist for that Story, our tool creates one.
For each Scenario, the tool creates a an ADO Test Case and then annotates the Scenario with the Test Case ID. This creates amazing traceability for each User Story as the related Test Cases are automatically linked to the Story in the Azure DevOps UI
Although we don’t do this, we could populate the TestCase with the step definitions from our cucumber Scenario. It’s a basic XML structure that describes the steps to take. This would be useful if we wanted to manually execute the test case using the Azure DevOps Test Case UI. Since we focus primarily on automation, we rely on the steps in our Feature files and our ADO Test Cases end up being symbolic links back to cucumber Scenarios.
Because our cucumber tests are written in C# (SpecFlow), we can get the full class name and method for the cucumber test code. Our tool is able to update the Azure DevOps Test Case with the automation details.
Any test case that isn’t ready for automation or must be done manually, we annotate the Scenario with a #ignore or #manual tag.
Using Azure DevOps Pipelines, we use the Visual Studio Test task to run our tests. The important point here is we execute the Test Plan option. This option fetches the Test Cases in the Test Plan that have automation and then executes the specific cucumber tests. The out-of-the-box functionally updates the Test Case statuses with the test results.
After running through automation, we use the Test Plan Report in Azure DevOps which shows the Test Case execution status over time and can distinguish between test automated and manual test cases.
We execute any remaining manual test cases to complete the Test Plan
For us, we often found that the manual cases that cannot be automated are exception cases, or cases that depend on external environment (for example malformed data, network connection not available, maintenance, first time guide...). These cases require special setup to simulate the environment when they happen.
Ideally, I believe it is possible to cover everything, given that you are prepared to go as far as you can to make it happen. But in reality, it is most often too much an effort needed that we prefer the hybrid approach of mixed manual-automatic test cases. We do, however, try to convert those exception cases over the time to automatic ones, by setting up separate environment to simulate exception cases and write automation tests against them.
Nevertheless, even with that effort, there would be cases when it's impossible to simulate, and I believe they should be covered by technical tests from engineers.
You could use an approach similar to the following example:
http://concordion.org/Example.html
When you use a build or continuous integration system to track your test runs, you could add simple specifications / tests for your manual cases that contain a text comparison (e.g. "pass" or "fail"). Then you would need to update the spec after each manual test run, check it in, and start the tests in your build / continuous Integration system. Then the manual results would be recorded together with the results of the automated test execution.
If you would use a tool like Concordion+ (https://code.google.com/p/concordion-plus/) you could even write a summary specification, which could contain scenarios for each of your manual tests. Each one would be reported as individual test result in your test execution environment.
Cheers
taking screen shots seems to be a good idea, you can still automate the verification but will need to go an extra mile. for instance when using Selenium you can add Sikuli(NB: u can't run headless test) to compare results (images) or take a screenshot with Robot (java.awt) use OCR to read text and assert or verify(TestNG)
We use TestNG and Selenium WebDriver to test our web application.
Now our problem is that we often have several tests that need to run in a certain order, e.g.:
login to application
enter some data
edit the data
check that it's displayed correctly
Now obviously these tests need to run in that precise order.
At the same time, we have many other tests which are totally independent from the list of tests above.
So we'd like to be able to somehow put tests into "groups" (not necessarily groups in the TestNG sense), and then run them such that:
tests inside one "group" always run together and in the same order
but different test "groups" as a whole can run in any order
The second point is important, because we want to avoid dependencies between tests in different groups (so different test "groups" can be used and developed independently).
Is there a way to achieve this using TestNG?
Solutions we tried
At first we just put tests that belong together into one class, and used dependsOnMethods to make them run in the right order. This used to work in TestNG V5, but in V6 TestNG will sometimes interleave tests from different classes (while respecting the ordering imposed by dependsOnMethods). There does not seem to be a way to tell TestNG "Always run tests from one class together".
We considered writing a method interceptor. However, this has the disadvantage that running tests from inside an IDE becomes more difficult (because directly invoking a test on a class would not use the interceptor). Also, tests using dependsOnMethods cannot be ordered by the interceptor, so we'd have to stop using that. We'd probably have to create our own annotation to specify ordering, and we'd like to use standard TestNG features as far as possible.
The TestNG docs propose using preserve-order to order tests. That looks promising, but only works if you list every test method separately, which seems redundant and hard to maintain.
Is there a better way to achieve this?
I am also open for any other suggestions on how to handle tests that build on each other, without having to impose a total order on all tests.
PS
alanning's answer points out that we could simply keep all tests independent by doing the necessary setup inside each test. That is in principle a good idea (and some tests do this), however sometimes we need to test a complete workflow, with each step depending on all previous steps (as in my example). To do that with "independent" tests would mean running the same multi-step setup over and over, and that would make our already slow tests even slower. Instead of three tests doing:
Test 1: login to application
Test 2: enter some data
Test 3: edit the data
we would get
Test 1: login to application
Test 2: login to application, enter some data
Test 3: login to application, enter some data, edit the data
etc.
In addition to needlessly increasing testing time, this also feels unnatural - it should be possible to model a workflow as a series of tests.
If there's no other way, this is probably how we'll do it, but we are looking for a better solution, without repeating the same setup calls.
You are mixing "functionality" and "test". Separating them will solve your problem.
For example, create a helper class/method that executes the steps to log in, then call that class/method in your Login test and all other tests that require the user to be logged in.
Your other tests do not actually need to rely on your Login "Test", just the login class/method.
If later back-end modifications introduce a bug in the login process, all of the tests which rely on the Login helper class/method will still fail as expected.
Update:
Turns out this already has a name, the Page Object pattern. Here is a page with Java examples of using this pattern:
http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects
Try with depends on group along with depends on method. Add all methods in same class in one group.
For example
#Test(groups={"cls1","other"})
public void cls1test1(){
}
#Test(groups={"cls1","other"}, dependsOnMethods="cls1test1", alwaysrun=true)
public void cls1test2(){
}
In class 2
#Test(groups={"cls2","other"}, dependsOnGroups="cls1", alwaysrun=true)
public void cls2test1(){
}
#Test(groups={"cls2","other"}, dependsOnMethods="cls2test1", dependsOnGroups="cls1", alwaysrun=true)
public void cls2test2(){
}
There is an easy (whilst hacky) workaround for this if you are comfortable with your first approach:
At first we just put tests that belong together into one class, and used dependsOnMethods to make them run in the right order. This used to work in TestNG V5, but in V6 TestNG will sometimes interleave tests from different classes (while respecting the ordering imposed by dependsOnMethods). There does not seem to be a way to tell TestNG "Always run tests from one class together".
We had a similar problem: we need our tests to be run class-wise because we couldn't guarantee the test classes not interfering with each other.
This is what we did:
Put a
#Test( dependsOnGroups= { "dummyGroupToMakeTestNGTreatThisAsDependentClass" } )
Annotation on an Abstract Test Class or Interface that all your Tests inherit from.
This will put all your methods in the "first group" (group as described in this paragraph, not TestNG-groups). Inside the groups the ordering is class-wise.
Thanks to Cedric Beust, he provided a very quick answer for this.
Edit:
The group dummyGroupToMakeTestNGTreatThisAsDependentClass actually has to exist, but you can just add a dummy test case for that purpose..