Tag Archives: agile

RSpec JUnit Formatter for Jenkins

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While RSpec is great, it is missing a built in JUnit formatter so you don’t get the pretty analysis stuff from Jenkins that you otherwise would. There have been a few attempts at writing an RSpec JUnit formatter, but I’ve never seen something work consistently across versions of RSpec. In my experience, the ci_reporter gem works well, but only with some versions of RSpec. Since it doesn’t work with the current version (2.10), I decided to write my own simple JUnit formatter that will allow me to run my tests in Jenkins. To use it, save the code that follows to a file called junit.rb and then call rspec with the following options:

rspec my_spec.rb -r ./junit.rb -f JUnit -o results.xml

That will cause RSpec to require the file containing the formatter, invoke the formatter and save the JUnit-formatted results to a file called results.xml. A better option would be to require the junit.rb file from your spec_helper.rb file (which in turn is being required by your .rspec file, right?). If you do that then you’ll only need to call the following:

rspec my_spec.rb -f JUnit -o results.xml

Anyway, here’s the code. Hope it helps!

SitePrism: Capybara Page Objects

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Capybara is a great browser interaction library for automated testing, but until now it hasn’t been much fun to follow the Page Object pattern with it. So, I wrote SitePrism that lets you do just that: SitePrism is a Page Object Model DSL for Capybara.

We’ve been using it at my current client since December 2011 and it’s proven a great success. Until now I’ve kept it quiet to allow some time to develop it to the point that it does everything we need, but a few days ago SitePrism went to version 1.0 – early adopters tell me that SitePrism’s intuitive API lets them create expressive and maintainable Page Objects with ease, so take a look! The SitePrism ReadMe will give you an idea of what it’s like to put together a Page Object model of the site you’re testing using SitePrism with capybara…

Here’s the code: https://github.com/natritmeyer/site_prism
And here’s the documentation: http://rdoc.info/gems/site_prism/frames

Go take a look, it might save you a lot of frustration!

RSpec and ci_reporter

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UPDATE: You may find this RSpec JUnit Formatter to be less hassle/more useful than ci_reporter…

In order to use rspec within hudson, you need to use the ci_reporter gem. The gem extends rspec’s behaviour to include the junit-style output required by hudson. Annoyingly, the documentation for creating a rspec rake task that uses ci_reporter is a bit sparse and not particularly “googleable”, so I’m putting some example code here for posterity. The following is all that is required in a Rakefile for the most basic rspec task that integrates with hudson:


require 'rspec/core/rake_task'
require 'ci/reporter/rake/rspec'

RSpec::Core::RakeTask.new(:all => ["ci:setup:rspec"]) do |t|
  t.pattern = '**/*_spec.rb'
end

You can now run the rspec task named “all” within hudson and get pretty results, graphs, and all the other goodness that hudson derives from junit output files. To run the above task:

rake all

Hope that saves you some searching around!

Is Cucumber adding value to your project? The Chicken Test!

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Don’t get me wrong – I love cucumber. I’ve been on projects where it has been used successfully and I’d partly attribute the success of those projects to the use of cucumber. It is a fantastic tool for BDD. When used right:

  • its scenarios provide a definitive specification of app functionality
  • its output provides one of the most useful metrics of progress: running passing tests
  • it gets everyone talking the same language
  • it provides a layer of abstraction between the required behavior and the app implementation (if you keep your steps declarative)
  • it helps to keep the focus on what code really needs to be written

All of this from one tool! Pretty good, huh? Well, like anything good, it comes with costs – those’ll be covered in a later post.

Whether the costs are outweighed by the benefits that cucumber can provide is dependent on how closely the customers, devs and testers are working together. The more blurred the roles of dev and test are and the more involved the customer is, the more value you’ll get from using cucumber. The further the devs are from the testers and the less involved the customer is, the less value cucumber will give you.

There comes a point where the costs of using cucumber outweigh the benefits – and that point comes along pretty quick IMHO. Most of the projects that I’ve seen using cucumber really shouldn’t be. Yes, it’s the flavor of the month. Yes, it’s what all the cool kidz are using. But it’s not a panacea. Using cucumber will not shower your project with pink unicorns or make your team collaborative. Too often I’ve seen cucumber used for CVDD/RDD instead of BDD – almost always a bad move…

Having been on quite a few projects that have used cucumber, I’ve come up with an unscientific and clumsy acid test that will show you if you should stop using cucumber and move to something with lower maintenance costs (eg: rspec/testunit/whatever). Here, in all its glory, is The Chicken Test™:

Instead of your usual feature description, try putting the following at the top of your next feature file:

Feature: [whatever feature is being written]
  As a chicken
  I want to cross the road
  In order to get to the other side

Possible results of The Chicken Test:

  • You get caught while typing - Pass. To have got caught this early you must be writing your scenarios collaboratively. Continue using cucumber.
  • You manage to get it checked in - I have a bad feeling about this… Get people talking again.
  • No one notices for a couple of days even though the scenarios are being run - Fail. If people aren’t even reading the scenarios, they’re not serving their purpose. Use rspec.
  • No one notices for a couple of months – Epic fail. Wipe that smug look off your face – you’ve made your point. The devs don’t want you testers “in the way”, so you may as well make life easier for yourself – move to rspec.

All too often, projects I’ve seen fail the chicken test. Does yours?

ThoughtWorks Anthology: Agile vs Waterfall Testing

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A pragprog book by the title “ThoughtWorks Anthology – Essays on Software, Technology and Innovation” has been hanging around the office gathering dust for the past few months. While waiting for a regression test run to finish today, I picked up the book and found, on page 177, a chapter (no 13) with the title: “Agile vs Waterfall Testing for Enterprise Web Apps”. Intrigued, I borrowed the book and read the chapter on the way home.

ThoughtWorks Anthology

If you haven’t done agile testing before or have just started and want a gentle introduction to the differences between testing in a waterfall world and the agile world, this is a great book.

It goes through the following:

  • Comparison of the waterfall and agile Testing Lifecycles
  • The different types of testing that occur (unit, functional, exploratory, etc)
  • Environment management (dev vs int vs stage environments) – what kind of testing to do where; what kind of sign-off to get in which environment
  • Tools required to get the job done (…though what is QTP doing in a list of recommended software automation tools!? …in an agile-focused book!?!!? …seriously?!?!???!)
  • Test-related roles within the team
  • …a few more things

Seriously, if you want a good high-level intro to agile testing, get this book. If you’ve been doing agile testing for a while, it’s still worth skimming over.

Lessons from a watir success story

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There aren’t enough UI test automation success stories documented on the net, so here’s my contribution.

This post is about  how we started with zero automated UI testing capability, and how a couple of months later we had the capability to run 1,000 tests in 20 minutes (you may also notice some gorilla-style chest-beating). Not only that, our test execution results were always spot on (no false passes, no false fails), and our framework was easy to maintain and extend. Here’s how we did it and the lessons we learned along the way.

The Phoenix rises from the ashes…

After several false starts with UI testing (involving QTP and watin and fitnesse and and and…), it finally got off the ground after I demonstrated what could be achieved with watir. This was the first lesson for me: demonstrating working code makes for a far better case than “just believe me, I’ve done it before, it’ll work fine”. Realizing this, I spent a weekend putting together a simple ruby/test::unit/watir testing framework.

When, on monday morning, I demoed a bunch of working tests that could run over and over and over and each time give the correct results to a room full of doubters, it was decided that we’d give ruby/test::unit/watir a go.

An important constraint

In order to avoid the biggest mistake made in previous attempts at UI automation, I insisted on agreement to a very important constraint: the ruby/test::unit/watir framework would only test the web app part of the system. One of my philosophies when it comes to UI automation is: “use the right tool for the right job”. There would be no scope creep. The framework would be used for the web app only. The WPF fat client could be tested with something else – anything else, just please don’t subvert ruby/test::unit/watir for testing anything else but the web app.

This was all part of expectations management; over the years I’ve learned that this is one of the most important things when doing automated UI testing. It’s worth a separate post – I’ll get around to it.

Framework overview

The framework I came up with that weekend was very simple (and very unoriginal – I’ve done similar stuff before): each page in the app would be represented by a ruby module. Each “page module” would contain one method per control on the web page; the method when called would return the required object. Eg:

module HomePage
  def home_page_sign_in_link
    @browser.link(:xpath, "//a[contains(@href,'signin')]")
  end
  def home_join_button
    @browser.button(:id, "join")
  end
end

My experience is that IDs on objects often can’t be trusted. What I’ve found is that they usually get put in during development and that they are removed when they’re not required. If I write my object recognition code to depend on an ID I usually regret it. I’ve learned that xpath is often more reliable – IDs tend to disappear. Where I have reliable IDs, I’ll use them. But for anything else, I use xpath. I find myself maintaining ID-based object recognition a lot more than xpath-based object recognition. Your mileage may vary.

Each of these page modules was “mixed in” to a common module which was then mixed into the test, making each object in the system available to the test without having to deal with namespacing. Not the prettiest solution, but it got us working very quickly. We surprised ourselves by having no method name clashes – mainly due to the object naming convention we used.

Our app uses restful services so the net::http libraries were great. The calls were wrapped up in classes and placed alongside our test-data-generation code (random strings, valid usernames, etc). We wrote them to be independent of the rest of the framework (apart from the central config file that pointed them at the right environment) so that we could use them whenever and however we liked. This philosophy was applied to as much of the framework as possible – to the greatest extent possible we kept everything independent and modular. This allowed us to keep up with sweeping changes in the app we were testing. We had a lot of sweeping changes; to many people’s amazement (not least our own!) we were able to keep up with everything thrown at us.

One of watir’s greatest features which doesn’t get nearly enough air time is the “checkers” functionality. Every time a page is visited you can run custom code you’ve wrapped up in a ruby proc. Environment instability usually manifests itself in obvious ways. Watir checkers allow you to recognize these as soon as they appear. If, in your checker code, you raise an exception with a fixed message, you can find these when the test is done and mark the tests as “failed due to environment instability”; or you can be more specific, e.g: “failed due to database connection going down, again”. This saves us hours of work every day. Literally, hours.

Our test execution script keeps note of tests that failed. When all the tests have been run, the tests that failed get run again in the hope that environment instability “got better”. We’d have to rerun those tests manually at the end of a run anyway, so why not automate it? A big time saver.

Test::Unit

We used test::unit for executing the tests. It’s simplicity and rock-solid nature made it a good choice to start the framework with. It is also easily expanded/monkey-patched – we added a few things to it.

Though I have ruby experience, everyone else on the team had a C#/NUnit background; test::unit helped bridge their knowledge gap. Conceptually, test::unit and NUnit are identical (both are xunit tools) – the similarity meant one less thing for the others to learn. When under pressure, that was a good thing.

Netbeans as an IDE

Netbeans‘ integration with test::unit is great, so we decided on using it for our IDE. It turns out that NetBeans is a great IDE for watir testing; I heartily recommend it. The green ticks and red crosses were comforting to all the right people, the ease of viewing the source code of the watir/firewatir libraries was great, its intellisense wasn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be and its svn integration is better than anything else I’ve used so far. It’s also free so I didn’t have to get approval to buy it! It has loads of useful plugins too.

Firefox plugins

We used firefox (and therefore firewatir) because we needed to spoof useragents and headers – using firefox profiles meant we could test the mobile, browser and fat client webstores. Using firefox meant we could use plugins; here are the ones we found most useful:

  • Firebug – it is awesome. Install it, learn it, love it.
  • XPath Checker – It’s a great tool which does one thing very well: Write an xpath and it’ll show you what it evaluates to. There are other tools that do the same thing and more but the experience of everyone on the team was that xpath viewer was all they needed. Everything else was bloat.

Version Control

One area where testing is usually decades behind development is in the use of version control. This is probably due to the fact that most commercial tools make it less than trivial to do (the QTP and RFT test file formats are hardly version-control-friendly).

One of the many joys of using watir for UI testing is that using version control is simple – there are no ‘project files’ to worry about, no accompanying files that you need to check in when you change a test file, no bizarre links across directories, no weird inter-file dependancies.

Using version control for our tests and framework meant that we were free to change stuff as we saw fit – if something didn’t work we could just revert. I can’t recommend using version control enough. The “blame” feature in svn was particularly useful ;)

Parallelization of test execution

We got our super-fast execution time by cheating: we parallelized the execution of the tests. We used a Mac Pro (16GB RAM, 8 core, 4xHDD), the Parallels virtualization software to run 12 VMs, and a shonky “n mod 12″ function to decide what tests to run on each VM (we tried to get testjour working but it needs a fair bit more dev and documentation before it works as advertised and becomes usable).

One advantage of using a Mac (apart from its rock-solid stability) was “Exposé” – we could see all 12 VMs running at once. The amount of people who walked past our desk and got hypnotized by seeing 12 tiny PCs each executing as if they were self aware… – good PR for our team!

Results sanitization

It doesn’t matter if you can run a million tests in 5 minutes, if the results aren’t accurate and sanitized quickly. We’re quite proud of the fact that we provide our results within 5 minutes of finishing the last test (usually straight away). We’ve put a lot of effort into being able to do this and it’s one of the biggest selling points of the framework we’ve written. Here’s what we’ve done to get to this stage:

  1. Though we use many VMs to execute tests on, when execution is finished we write all the results to a central location. We don’t have to worry about collating results, it’s done automatically.
  2. We use the watir checker feature heavily (see above). Any test that failed because of an environment problem is marked as such. This means that we don’t need to investigate why the test failed – we know that it didn’t get past the login screen because we saw the “database connection down” message, not because there’s a bug in login.
  3. Where we find a bug, we put the number in the relevant assertion message. If the test fails at the same point in the next run, it’s because the bug is still there. The bug will be printed to the results file and when our summary script runs over the results it’ll mark the test as a known fail due to the bug referenced in the assertion message. A particularly awesome feature!
  4. Every test that hasn’t been marked as a known fail (environment or known bug) gets added to a list of tests that need to be investigated. They’ve already been run twice (see above), so there’s a very high chance that a regression bug has crept in.
  5. As well as a count of the various flavors of failed tests, we also gave percentages. These mean far more to the scrum masters, so that’s what we gave them.

Making the effort public

Initially, there was a lot of hostility toward the project – understandably! UI testing doesn’t have a good history where I work at the moment. One of the scrum masters pointed out that the best PR was fast, consistent and accurate test results and he was right. But there are a few more things that gave people reason to change their opinion.

  1. Every time our tests found a regression bug, we updated our “bug count” on a big, visible-to-all white board. There was no denying the value that we provided (we crossed the 100 bug count in only a few weeks)
  2. We gave the scrum masters remote access to our run machine. This allowed them to kick off test runs and watch them as they progressed. The instant feedback they got blew them away. The Exposé functionality let them see environment instability issues as soon as they occurred allowing them to go and kick some heads in the infrastructure team as soon as there was a problem.
  3. We put our test execution box on the end of our desk, facing out. As mentioned above, the Exposé function was great PR for the team. In the weeks before go-live, many evenings were spent huddled around the screen as we would do test run after test run with 6 or 7 people from varying levels of management all hypnotized by the tiny windows!
  4. The test owners wrote their tests on a wiki page – as soon as a test was automated we would mark it as such. Test owners knew exactly where they stood.

Summary of the lessons we learned

  1. Sell the idea of watir-based automated UI testing with working code
  2. Manage your managers’ expectations well
  3. Keep the framework simple – complexity you don’t need introduces risk you probably can’t afford
  4. Use the right tool for the right job
  5. Use free tools where possible; you’ll be freed from the hassle of purchasing stuff
  6. Use version control – it will be your salvation many times over
  7. For object-recognition, use xpath unless you have reliable IDs you can depend on
  8. Attempt to recognize environment-related errors in the test and report on them as such (watir checkers)
  9. Keep as much of your framework code as modular and independent as possible
  10. Make the test team’s work public. Provide test results as soon as is possible.
  11. Put a lot of effort into making results sanitization as quick as possible. There is very little as frustrating for a scrum master/test manager as knowing that test execution is complete but that the results “aren’t ready yet”.

That’s all for now!

Quick and easy Watir test suites with Test::Unit

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A test team usually has a need for a few fixed test suites, eg: a sanity suite or a suite which contains all tests for a full run. There’s usually also a need to be able to create suites with arbitrary tests in it, eg: a suite that tests all account management functionality or a suite that runs all tests for a particular platform. There is often the need to quickly throw together a suite which can be used to regression-test a specific area of functionality.

If you’re using a ruby + watir + test::unit framework, there’s a simple way to get all of the above flexible suite buliding functionality. Here’s how…

First of all, a few prerequisites… They are:

  1. All your TestCase class files should be in one folder
  2. Your TestCase class file names should follow a strict and scalable naming convention

For the purposes of this blog post, we’ll use a simple naming convention: all test files in our imaginary project begin with test_ , all suite files begin with suite_ and all test files that test account functionality contain the word account in their file name.

Test::Unit has the concept of ‘require files’… any file that requires a TestCase file will cause the test to be executed (unless something has been done to prevent tests from being run). These require files can be used as test suites – any tests that are ‘required’ in the test suite will get executed! So, the first way you could use these require files is to individually require each TestCase file. Here’s an example… a file called suite_account_tests.rb containing the following lines; each one will load a file containing a TestCase file:

require "test_account_join"
require "test_account_close"
require "test_account_upgrade"
require "test_account_change_details"

This works, but it is laborious to build, and even more of a pain to maintain. There has to be a better way… and here it is: instead of requiring each individual file that has the word account in it, you can get ruby to do the work for you. Replace the contents of suite_account_tests.rb with the following line:

Dir.glob(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '*account*.rb')).each {|f| require f }

That one line will read in all ruby files that contain the word ‘account’ in the file name, and that live in the same directory as the suite_account_tests.rb file. Then, because this is just a test::unit require file, all the TestCase classes that got required will get executed. Awesome. No need to update the suite file if an account-related TestCase file is added or deleted; it will pick up any changes automatically. All that’s required is a good naming convention…

The power of that one-liner lies in the Dir.glob function. It takes filename ‘patterns’ (shame it doesn’t take a regex) documented in the Dir.glob rdoc to decide which files to run. If you’ve got a strict naming convention, you’ll find that the Dir.glob functionality lets you create suites very quickly. If you can’t create suites quickly now, you’ll find that it’s great PR for the test team when you can!

Using these patterns, with the following one-liner we can build a suite that will run all tests:

Dir.glob(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'test_*.rb')).each {|f| require f }

All files that begin with test_ will get required and executed. This works because of the file naming convention we’re using. Only TestCase files begin with test_, so we can be sure that only tests are getting loaded. Specifically, suite files won’t be loaded as their file names begin with suite_, not test_. Anyway, you get the idea.

There’s nothing stopping you from combining the two approaches. You can have a require file that uses both the Dir.glob approach that also has individual requires if the suite needs to include specific TestCases classes.

One non-obvious advantage that this Dir.glob approach to suite files gives you is that you won’t ‘lose’ tests any more. I’ve found that when I’ve used the individual-require approach, on occasion I forget to add a require to the suite when I create a new TestClass file. I end up with tests that gather dust – they never get run. They are forgotten and left to rot. By the time I find them again, the tests are so out of date that they often need rewriting, never mind editing!

Ruby gives you a whole load of power for free; you may as well use it!

Fitnesse, Ruby and the Mac

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I’ve recently started using Fitnesse, an acceptance testing framework. There really isn’t much around on how to get it working on the mac with ruby, so I decided to get it working and put up my findings…

Installing the Fit Ruby Gem

First of all, you’ll need to download the Fitnesse ruby gem. It isn’t complete by any stretch of the imagination, but it does the job. To get it, run the following command, entering your administrator password when prompted:


sudo gem install fit

You should see the following as a result:


Successfully installed fit-1.1

Installing the Fitnesse Server

Now, you’ll need to download Fitness… Click here, and select the most recent version (20070619 at time of writing). I downloaded the fitnesse20070619.zip version.

Unzip the file, and copy the resulting fitnesse folder to the Applications folder (there’s where I put it… if you do the same, it’ll be easy to follow along with this post).

Allowing Fitnesse to run

We now have to set the correct unix file permissions to allow the Fitnesse server to run. Back to the terminal, this time entering the following commands:


cd /Applications/fitnesse/
chmod +x run.sh

That sets the “I can be executed” flag on the file, allowing us to run the server. Not very Mac-like, but it has to be done.

Setting up the Ruby Fixture Code

We’ll now prepare the ruby fixture code (ie: the test) that we’ll eventually be executing. Having this in place before we create the Fitnesse page gives us the ability to test everything we do whilst trying to get it all to work – it’s a painful process, anything to make it easier is a good thing).

I created the following file…

/Users/nat/Development/Projects/Ruby/WatirFitFramework/lib/Framework/Testcase.rb

…with the following contents…

require 'rubygems'
require 'fit/column_fixture'
module Framework
class Testcase < Fit::ColumnFixture
attr_accessor :numerator
attr_accessor :denominator
def quotient
@numerator.to_f / @denominator.to_f
end
end
end

Make sure that the the case used for the name is consistent. I advise using a filename beginning with a capital letter, followed by only lowercase letters.

Setting up the Fitnesse Test Page

We first of all need to start the fitnesse server. Back to the terminal…


cd /Applications/fitnesse/
./run.sh -p 8080

The “-p 8080″ means that the fitnesse server will be running on port 8080. Ports lower than 1024 will cause errors.

Now open Safari (or any other web browser – I’m using safari for this post) and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8080. If you see the “Welcome to Fitnesse!” page, all is good.

Due to the way that test suites work in fitnesse, I decided to put the config stuff in a parent page, and the test itself in a child page. I haven’t got the space/time/energy to explain that concept – see the fitnesse documentation for that.

I created the “NatTest” page by going to http://127.0.0.1:8080/NatTest and clicking on the “create this page” link that is displayed as a result.

In the page (click the ‘Edit’ link in the navigation column) I added the following:


!define COMMAND_PATTERN {ruby -I %p /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/fit-1.1/bin/FitServer.rb}
!path /Users/nat/Development/Projects/Ruby/WatirFitFramework/lib

The first line tells fitnesse how to run ruby, and the second line tells fitnesse where our ruby fixture code is.

Next, I created the actual fitnesse test by navigating to http://127.0.0.1:8080/NatTest.TheTest, again clicking on the “create this page” link. In it, I pasted the following ColumnFixture table:


|Framework.Testcase|
|numerator|denominator|quotient?|
|10|2|5|
|12.6|3|4.2|
|100|4|24|

Last thing now… we need to make our “TheTest” page an actual test so that fitnesse can execute it. To do that, click on the “Properties” link in the navigation column, check the “Test” check button and then click “Save properties”.

Run the test

In the navigation column there should now be a “Test” button. Click it…

If all has gone well, you should see some test results. From here on, you’re by yourself.