I've actually looked through Selenium questions on here and didn't find quite what I was looking for.
Basically I have about 10 "use cases" for smoke testing my site. Basic things such as, can a user log in, can they register etc..
I want to set this up on an interval such as every 10 minutes run these tests.
Is this possible with Selenium Remote Control? Does anyone have a link/tutorial they could point me towards. I'm fairly confident this is possible but I'm just not 100% sure how to get it all set up and running.
Thanks in advance.
Yes this can be done with Selenium RC. I have some Selenium Tutorials on my site. I have set up a basic user experience monitor before using Selenium RC, C#/Nunit and Windows Scheduled tasks to start the job to check the speed of our web app through the day.
Since I recommend using Selenium RC you can use any language you want to write the test.
Dending on what kind of environment you're working with you could use something like JUnit and an automated build system like hudson. This gives you all sorts of notification infrastructure when something goes wrong.
I have known people to run a script like this against both test and production systems (with a fixed user). In test environments you can discover programming mistakes, in production you can assess the up-ness of your system at a far more interesting level than pings or process watching.
Take a look at New Relic's Synthetics product, which wraps Selenium and provides periodic runs with alerting.
Related
This is a bit high-level solution based question: I have a website, and what I need to do is login->navigate->click category->check whether the specific content has come; every 10 mins.
There are quite a few third-party services, but they only checking the website uptime, which is not what I need.
Currently, I am thinking of silly way: create a selenium UI test, and run it every 10 mins, which seems pretty complex.
Feels like need some tool, so that I can run some extra js on a particular web to test my functionality. Any good solution for this? even some js framework, or even third-party payable service that I can direct make use of?
Thanks.
The best way to do this is :
Create a selenium test - Single main method that does all the steps.
Export it as a runnable jar
Schedule the .jar execution using windows scheduler.
Before scheduling the jar, once just double click the .jar file and see if the steps run smoothly.
Alternately you can try using vbscript (.vbs) file also.
Question
Is it worth building a web application front-end for my department's automated regression tests? I've searched quite a bit and I don't think anything like this exits. Basically the web application would allow a user to specify a URL, expected inputs, and expected outputs and an expected return URL. On the back-end a headless browser would be running on the server to test the scenario just defined by the user, most likely using calls to a headless browser... I've searched quite a bit to see if something as simple as this exists but I haven't had any luck. I've found lots of tools for allowing programmatic operation of browser commands but a web front-end for testing another web application I have not.
Background
My team has dedicated automated regression tests that the testers run on their local machines. The tests are written in Python, utilize some Selenium integration plugins, and use an excel spreadsheet as input on what to test. They are maintained by the QA department.
Problem
Nobody outside the QA team knows how extensive these regression tests
are because they exist only on individual laptops.
They have no central repository, and the dev team has no means of
actively updating these tests as we build new features. We must leave
it 100% up to the QA department.
The business analysts don't have access to the results of these
tests. Because of all this, a lot of uncertainty exists around our
automated testing increasing reluctance to change things without
instructing the QA team to perform full scale manual regression
tests...
This has led me to consider putting all of our Selenium tests in the cloud behind a user-friendly web front-end that anyone can use and access from anywhere. They could then easily create new tests using dropdown menus. Everyone, developers, testers, and business analysts, can see whats covered in a test sequence and update them as we add new features. I believe this would also make it easier to have Jenkins jobs trigger tests to run at timed intervals if web application exposed web service hooks for jenkins... But I feel like perhaps I'm re-inventing the wheel. Is what I'm proposing to build worth it?
Personally i would not spend too much time in creating a website to accept user input to create a testscript. Instead I would spend that time in creating a solid test framework and use Jenkins to trigger the tests.
You also need to consider the 'website' maintenance in future. What will happen if some new feature has to be included in the website? QA/BA team will depend on the developer to add the feature.
I think it is better to use keyword driven framework - where you can write your entire test in spreadsheet. [In my project QA people who are not familiar with programming create test scripts with this approach].
As Jenkins web based application - anyone can trigger your automated regression tests. Even the BAs (in my project, that is what i have done). No technical skill is required. We can also pass parameters through jenkins. Parameters can be anything from text to a file. So, you can upload a file which contains the steps to be executed to the jenkins job and the rest should be taken care by your test framework.
You would definitely need a central repository. It is a must have. You can take a look at VisualSVN server. It is easy and FREE.
Keyword Driven framework using Selenium:
http://www.testautomationguru.com/keyword-driven-framework-for-localization-testing-using-selenium-webdriver/
Continuous regression & results:
http://www.testautomationguru.com/continuous-regression-testing-best-practises/
Smoke Test after each build:
http://www.testautomationguru.com/automated-smoke-test-best-practises/
I need to enter pretty much the same date on few handful of similar sites using web automation tools/ software. I am not doing testing I just want to use automation side of the tools. I need to enter the data same time ( as real time as possible ). I am wondering if one tool has advantage over other as I am using it just for automation.
I am using Selenium grid to scrape thousands of pages since all the pages are heavily populated by Javascript.
I found this tutorial which gave me a pretty good idea of how to set up Selenium grid and run script in parallel. However, my situation is a little different.
(1) I only want one type of browser, like Chrome(or Firefox), but I want to run as many as possible.
(2) To make sure this solution scale, I probably will use some Cloud service where the code will be running in Linux environment.
So here is my question:
Do I have to use TestNG/Junit frame work to run the code in parallel? If I run the code in multiple processes, all making requests to the same hub, will the hub coordinate them out of box?
(1) I only want one type of browser, like Chrome(or Firefox), but I
want to run as many as possible.
You should be running not as many possible, but a heuristic number, that just works for you. The reason being is, running like 30 chrome browsers at a time can give you unpredictable results.
(2) To make sure this solution scale, I probably will use some Cloud
service where the code will be running in Linux environment.
You can look at BrowserStack
Do I have to use TestNG/Junit frame work to run the code in parallel?
Thats upto you. As far as your creating the driver in multiple threads your fine. If your using your own FW, then you can create Thread pool and start creating the driver from each thread pool.
If I run the code in multiple processes, all making requests to the
same hub, will the hub coordinate them out of box?
Yes Selenium Hub will be co-ordinating this for you, out of the box. You no need to worry about anything here.
I'd like to run tests that simulate users modifying certain data at the same time for a grails application.
Are there any plug-ins / tools / mechanisms I can use to do this efficiently? They don't have to be grails specific. It should be possible to fire multiple actions in parallel.
I'd prefer to run the tests on functional level (so far I'm using Selenium for other tests) to see the results from the user perspective. Of course this can be done in addition to integration testing if you'd recommend to run concurrent modification tests on integration level as well.
I have used Geb (http://grails.org/plugin/geb/) for this recently. It is a layer on top of WebDriver and Selenium etc.. Its very easy to write a Grails script to act as a user in your app and then just run several instances on different consoles. Geb uses a jQuery style syntax for locating stuff in the DOM which is very cool:
import geb.Browser
import geb.Configuration
includeTargets << grailsScript("_GrailsInit")
target(main: "Do stuff as fast as possible") {
Configuration cfg = new Configuration(baseUrl: "http://localhost:8080/your_app/")
Browser.drive(cfg) {
go "user/login"
$("#login form").with {
email = "someone#somewhere.com"
password = "secret"
_action_Login().click()
}
...
}
}
setDefaultTarget(main)
Just put your script in scripts/YourScript.groovy and then you can do "Grails YourScript" to run it. I tracked down some concurrency issues by just running several of these at full speed. You do need to build a war and deploy it properly as Grails in dev mode is very slow and runs out of permgen space quite quickly.
Just an idea: it seems difficult to make client starts at the same time, but can they wait for each other just before modifying data?
Such as, a client keeps logging its process: "Client x access DATA", "Client x editing DATA" in a file. They also keep looking this log file, to see other clients' progress. Then don't permit a client complete editing a DATA until another client comes in to edit that DATA.
I've found Grinder to be an excellent tool for heavy load testing. Running multiple instances performing the same tests at one time can often uncover concurrency issues in your app that you wouldn't find with normal tests.
If you want to do this within Unit Tests or in-code Integration Tests, you could always spin up multiple threads in code and have them perform the task you're trying to test.
Are you primarily interested in load testing multiple active users, as opposed to those who just have a HttpSession? Solid load testing is predicated on really really good func. testing however. How are your functional tests organized and executed to-day? Grails has a plug-in* for that, too, and it appears to be in the Top of the Pops at the plug-in portal.
Are you attempting to test out how the optimistic locking mechanism performs under load?
If the former use case is the one that means more, it sounds like you may be looking for JUnitPerf. Here is the --> download
*functional-test <1.2.7> -- Functional Testing
WebTest is built on Ant which provides the parallel task. You might be able to use this in conjuction with the Webtest plugin to run some actions in parallel. I've never tried it though.
Have a look at MultithreadedTC. It looks like it could be used to exercise certain interleaving cases where multiple threads are executing your code in ways you consider potentially risky.
I doubt you'll find a convenient way to test specific multithreaded interleaving cases with Selenium because Selenium controls a browser which sends requests to your server. I haven't heard of a way to instrument code for multithreaded interleaving tests when the threads are started as real web requests to a running web server.