I'm new to Selenium and need your help to understand the difference between Grid2, Grid, and remoteWebDriver. I like the consept behind Selenium Grid, but notice there is Grid2 using Selenium2. Then heard about RemoteWebDriver and now I'm not sure how they are related and which one is better to implement original selenium Grid concept.
Any help is appreciated.
Basically:
Grid 2 is the new version of Grid, which works with the new WebDriver-Backed Selenium (Selenium 2).
The term "Selenium" is often used interchangeably with "WebDriver", but they are not the same thing; Selenium is powered by WebDriver. Selenium provides a more robust feature set, and while you can accomplish the same things with WebDriver, Selenium takes care of the details for some of the more complex operations.
RemoteWebDriver interacts with the Grid to run tests across multiple machines or VMs.
In other words, you write your tests with the RemoteWebDriver (or with Selenium 2), and then you can plug them into the grid.
Related
I'm currently working on writing a suite of test scripts using watir webdriver. Is there something out there that would make script generation easier than looking directly at the HTTP and manually putting the script together? Maybe something captures user interactions with the browser elements and then writes that to a script.
I could just write them manually, but I may as well ask and see if there is a better way.
There are a couple record and playback tools that are available for Selenium (like IDE), and several non-open source solutions as well. Most of the Selenium and Watir development communities actively discourage their usage for writing test suites as they create very brittle tests that are difficult to maintain over time.
Watir does allow you to locate elements based on text or regular expressions, which can make it easier to find many elements without looking at the html. In general, though, you the tester have a better idea of the structure of your website, what id elements are there, and what css elements are unique on a page, or unlikely to change with future site updates, etc.
I have a scenario where I need to do performance test on a web application to check when multiple users login to the app and use, then the UIs are getting rendered in time (fast response). I don't want to use record & replay. Is there a way i can run my existing selenium UI tests from Loadrunner with multiple users ?
Thanks in advance
Amit
It may be possible.
First hurdle is language. Loadrunner supports a few languages. The two I know for which there are also Selenium bindings are Java and C#. If your Selenium scripts are in either one or can be packaged and invoked from JVM or CLR (e.g. Python) it could be possible.
Second hurdle is hardware to support user load. Running the browsers will take a lot of resources. I think you could feasibly run three browsers (Chrome, FF and IE) on a single box. That limits you to three users per agent. If you have hardware to run the number of agents to meet your user load it could be possible. UI rendering times will be meaningless.
The loadrunner script will be a C# or Java project. Add whatever references you need to run your Selenium tests and invoke from there.
However, my gut reaction is this may be rickety. Error handling will add complexity. These alternatives may give a better outcome:
Ditch the idea of using Loadrunner and use a service like Neustar to run multiple Selenium tests. If user load is low, Selenium Grid may also be an option.
Ditch the idea of using Selenium and code in the Loadunner web API.
There is an Eclipse addin for LoadRunner.
You can install this addin, import LoadRunner references and add transaction to your selenium scripts.
Here is a link, that has detailed description about above procedure.
http://www.joecolantonio.com/2014/05/08/how-to-run-a-selenium-script-in-loadrunner/
But yes as earlier said you have to take memory usage into considerations.
No. If you wish to run GUI virtual users in a LoadRunner context then your model is through QuickTest Professional.
The act of rendering (actual drawing of pixels on the screen after an item is downloaded or rasterized) will remain the same for a given speed of video card independent of load on the system as the actual draw to the screen is a local client side activity.
I suspect you mean something different than rendering (drawing on the screen).
Can BDD (Behavior Driven Design) tests be implemented using a UI driver?
For example, given a web application, instead of:
Writing tests for the back-end, and then more tests in Javascript for the front-end
Should I:
Write the tests as Selenium macros, which simulate mouse-clicks, etc in the actual browser?
The advantages I see in doing it this way are:
The tests are written in one language, rather than several
They're focussed on the UI, which gets developers thinking outside-in
They run in the real execution environment (the browser), which allows us to
Test different browsers
Test different servers
Get insight into real-world performance
Thoughts?
We've done this for a C# application using a WPF testing tool (WipFlash) and writing NUnit tests in a BDD-like fashion.
e.g.
Given.TheApplicationWindowIsOpen();
When.I.Press.OKButton();
The.Price.ShouldBeCalculated();
We had to code a lot of the DSL ourselves, needless to say. But it becomes a business/customer readable solution.
Try using SpecFlow with WatiN: (I'm not sure if you're using .NET here)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg490346.aspx
For web testing, you could try WebDriver. The Selenium team are busy integrating WebDriver at the moment. Simon Stewart from Google, who created WebDriver, blogged here about how it works differently to Selenium.
WebDriver uses different technologies for each browser. For Internet Explorer, WebDriver uses Microsoft's UI automation - the same technology on which WipFlash which #Brian Agnew mentioned is based. This is as close as you'll get to pretending to click buttons. Simon's blog shows why this approach can be more powerful than Selenium's Javascript solution.
WebDriver is available from the Selenium site but hasn't been fully implemented as part of Selenium yet.
For BDD, and any use-case driven tests, it is important to be able to communicate what a test is doing. The problem with many test suites is that post-writting nobody is quite certain exactly what the test is doing. This will come up very often if you write in a non-specialized language. Specialization doesn't necessarily mean a special language, but just enough of an abstraction in the one language so it is clear what is happening.
For example, a lot of tests have code that looks like this (pseudo-code, I won't pick on any particular framework):
object = createBrowser()
response = object.gotoURL( "http://someurl.com" );
element = response.getLink( "Click Here" );
response = element.doClick();
This is hard for somebody to quickly translate to a business driver (product manager perhaps, or user). Instead you want to create specialized functions, or a language if you're adventurous, so you can have this:
GotoURL http://someurl.com/
Click link:Click Here
Selenium, and its macros or interface, are still fairly low-level in this regards. If you do use them then at least build some wrappers around them.
You can of course also use a product called TestPlan. It has Selenium in the back-end and exposes a high-level API, and a custom langauge for testing. It also goes beyond just the web to included Email, FTP, etc. The sample language above is a TestPlan snippet
You can certainly do some of your acceptance tests this way, but I think most BDD advocates would not advise using this for all tests. And of course, true BDD advocates wouldn't call them tests...
The RSpec Book advocates a two-level cycle with acceptance tests (or Scenarios) written first (primarily in Cucumber), and unit tests written (in RSpec) in an inner cycle more resembling the traditional TDD.
The outer cycle of acceptance testing can also use tools like Selenium to drive the entire application through the UI (and the authors of The RSpec Book spend a chapter on this). But it is not appropriate for unit tests.
Tests exercising the entire application through the UI are harder to make repeatable, and have a tendency to be slower and more fragile than unit tests.
Actually you could do both - make a user-centric Driver interface (agnostic of GUI / tech / impl). You could then write a UIDriver and a APIDriver and choose a driver to run a specific test. Running through the UI is usually slower (out of proc, control repaints but somehow creates a higher level of confidence initially). Running through the API is much faster (in proc, easy setup-teardown).
The trick here is to separate the What from the How. Otherwise you will end up with ObscureTests and high test maintenance. Ensure the primary focus on testing and not automation.
So I'm trying to get an environment set up that acts like a selenium grid in that:
1) It runs the tests in parallel across a distributed set of clients
2) I can specify tests to run on specific clients (which are running on different OS's, with different browsers), or tests to run once on all the clients or any combination thereof.
The problem is that capybara actually currently uses WebDriver, not selenium, so as far as I know I can't specify a selenium grid for the tests to hook up to and have it work.
I've looked into things such as DeepTest and Testjour, but neither scratches both itches above. I'd love for there to be a way I can tag a cucumber feature with what browsers I want it run on, and it just does it, like selenium grid currently does. Is there an easy way I can do this without a lot of hackery on my part, or do I need to wait for Selenium 2 to be released?
Oh and I should add I've love to keep capybara's ability to swap out web drivers at will - running on selenium (or WebDriver I guess I should say), htmlunit, etc.
There is currently a version of grid for webdriver under development.
You can find info about it here
So one potential solution I'm digging into here is Hydra. It seems to work for parallel execution of cucumber scenarios across multiple machines simply using ssh, thus scratching itch #1 above. I've set it up and have it running properly on two macs and a windows VM, and things are running smoothly. However, itch #2 remains unscratched. So I forked it, and my first pass is to simply set up a way to run all features on all machines in a parallel manner, ensuring that all features get tested on every supported browser we have. My next pass may be to hack in a way to to be able to specify which features run on which machines, if time permits and the need is great enough. We'll see how it goes.
I would like to know how to go about doing regression testing effectively for a web application.
I m spending a lot of time in regression testing for every build.
I also hear that automated GUI testing is bad and not worth it.
Is there any better way of automating regression testing. if so any good tools to automate GUI tests.
My web app is designed for stupid IE. cant help it, but that how it is.Any good tool that can help me?
I know that we must keep GUI layer thin and all, but I m not a GUI expert or anything , but i need to test it properly and effectively.
Thanks all
Try looking into Cucumber or Selenium
There is also a screencast on it over at railscasts.
That should really help.
You can use standard unit tests and integration tests for the non-GUI components, of course. For the GUI, it's worth looking at UI automation packages.
Many of them are pretty terrible, but a lot of the horror stories come from people using them incorrectly. If you can stay away from specifying click locations by (x,y) coordinates, and you can detect when state transitions happen, rather than using delay(), GUI testing can be effectively automated.
As long as your webapp works with Firefox, too, I recommend using Selenium for that scenario. It allows you to record your test cases inside the browser (by means of a Firefox plugin) but has Internet Explorer support for playback.
If Firefox for recording tests is not an option, you could have a look at the WebDriver project. It uses a code based approach to test specification an works well with TDD, too.
You might also want to have a look at CubicTest, which is a Eclipse plugin for graphically defining Selenium and Watir test cases.