Test Automation with Cucumber - Capybara

Test Automation with Cucumber - Capybara - Selenium in Ruby

For a company which uses agile development methodology, test automation is very critical. However meaning of test automation in agile is little bit different from the automation activities in waterfall or V-model development methodology. In agile a user story should be automated before the feature is developed and when it is ready then automated test cases can be run to test user stories.

For agile test automation, using only selenium is not enough or is not the best approach because of the written test cases. There should be another tool used for writing test cases which automation script can understand and perform what test cases/user stories explain. Cucumber is the tool what I want to explain. With Cucumber we can write test cases and with language called Gherkin which is very easy and understandable for everyone. So we just need to learn the keywords like "Given, When, Then, Examples, Scenario, Scenario Outline, ..." they are not too many, for more information about Gherkin you can visit this page and this page.

Capybara is another test automation framework which is developed by Jonas Nicklas, it is like selenium but the number of functions is fewer than the functions in Selenium. And I can say that it is more powerful than Selenium, depends on my little experience. Maybe worst part of the Cucumber is that you need to write your test cases in Ruby, no support for other languages. You can more information about Capybara from this page.

Using Cucumber with Capybara or Selenium, you need to first create your testcase.feature file and create your script file which reflects the feature file. As a first sight, this may mean that you are trying two times instead of just writing your test scripts file. However, Cucumber is very effective and it suggest you to add scripts, then you just need to write inside of the functions, as you can see in the following command:

cucumber test/features/ --dry -run

Another good part of the Cucumber/Capbybara you can select your webdriver. You can select :webkit, :chrome, :selenium (as firefox) and :poltergiest. If you want to run headless-testing, which means that there is no browser opens and closes but test is running and and it gives you the result, then you need change default driver instead of selenium as following from test/feature/support/env.rb:

#Capybara.default_driver = :selenium
Capybara.default_driver = :poltergeist

You can download my repository which goes to Amazon.com and login with correct user and password and check the error message for non-correct password. Don't forget to add your credentials.

https://github.com/gunesmes/cucumber_capybara_selenium

Selenium Error "Element is not currently interactable and may not be manipulated"

Selenium webdriver can drive different browsers like as Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer. These browsers actually cover the majority of internet users, so testing these browsers possibly covers the 90% of the internet users. However, there is no guaranty that the same automation scripts can work without a failure on these three browsers. For this reason, automation code should be error-prone for the browsers you want to cover. The following error is caught when the test script run for Chrome and Internet Explorer, but surprisingly there is no error for the Firefox. Selenium gives an error like below: Traceback (most recent call last): File "D:\workspace\sample_project\sample_run.py", line 10, in <module> m.login() File "D:\workspace\ sample_project \test_case_imps.py", line 335, in login driver.find_element_by_id("id_username").clear() File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.35.0-py2.7.egg\seleni...

Change Default Timeout and Wait Time of Capybara

One of the biggest challenge for automation is handling timeout problem. Most of the time, timeout is 60 seconds but it may sometimes not enough if you have badly designed asynchronous calls or the third party ajax calls. This makes handling timeout more complex. set large enough to tolerate network related problems. For Selenium based automation frameworks, like Capybara, default Webdriver timeout is set to Net::ReadTimeout (Net::ReadTimeout) Changing ReadTimeout If you have timeout problem for Capybara, it gives an error like above. This means that the page is not fully loaded in given timeout period. Even you can see that page is loaded correctly but webdriver wait until the Ajax calls finish. class BufferedIO #:nodoc: internal use only def initialize (io) @io = io @read_timeout = 60 @continue_timeout = nil @debug_output = nil @rbuf = '' end . . . . . def rbuf_fill beg...

Create an Alias for Interactive Console Work: Selenium and Capybara

If you are working on shell most of the time Aliases are very helpfull and time saving. For testing purposes you can use Alias for getting ready your test suites. In this post, I want to explain both running Selenium and Capybara on console and creating aliases for each. This post is for Windows machines, if you are using Unix-like see this post . Creating Scripts for Selenium and Capybara First of all, it is assumed that you have installed Selenium and Capybara correctly and they work on your machines. If you haven't installed, you can see my previous posts. I am using the Selenium with Python and the Capybara with Ruby. You can use several different language for Selenium but Capybara works only with Ruby. Create scripts in a directory called scripts (in your home folder, like as ~/scripts ) for your automation tool as following, save them as capybara.rb, sel.py : Creating Aliases Depends on your favourite shell, you need to add the al...

Page-Object Pattern for Selenium Test Automation with Python

Page-object model is a pattern that you can apply it to develop efficient automation framework. With the page-model, it is possible to minimize maintenance cost. Basically page-object means that your every page is inherited from a base class which includes basic functionalities for every page. If you have some new functionalities that every page should have, you can simple add it to the base class. Base class is like the following: In this part we are creating pages which are inherited from base page. Every page has its own functionalities written as python functions. Some functions return to a new page, it means that these functions leave the current page and produce a new page. You should write as much as functions you need in the assertion part because this is the only part you can use the webdriver functions to interact with web pages . This part can be evaluate as providing data to assertion part. The last part is related to...

Performance Testing on CI: Locust is running on Jenkins

For a successful Continuous Integration pipeline, there should be jobs for testing the performance of the application. It is necessary if the application is still performing well. Generally performance testing is thought as kinds of activities performed one step before going to live. In general approach it is true but don't forget to test your application's performance as soon as there is an testable software, such as an api end point, functions, and etc. For CI it is a good approach to testing performance after functional testing and just before the deployment of next stage. In this post, I want to share some info about Jenkins and Locust. In my previous post you can find some information about Locust and Jenkins. Jenkins operates the CI environment and Locust is a tool for performance testing. To run the Locust on Jenkins you need command line arguments which control the number of clients , hatch rate, running locust without web interface and there s...

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