Effective Use of Cucumber with Calabash

BDD, which is stand for behaviour driven development, is created by Dan North. BDD is developed on the top of TDD, which is stand for test driven development to remove the gap of unit testing and acceptance testing. In TDD, every unit is started to be written right after defining the expectations from the units, by the unit testing. However by BDD, regarding the agile story, every unit is specified and tested in terms of desired behaviour. This 'desired behaviour' is what exactly business requires in agile stories.

BDD can be applied by the help of some tools to interpret the business 'desired behaviour' to test code. There are some tools that help this aim such as Behat for PHP, JBhave for Java world, and the most famous one Cucumber for the Ruby world. In this post I want to give some points on how to effectively we can use Cucumber for a Calabash project to automate some agile stories for sample android application.

Cucumber takes some keywords like Given, When, And, Then, Background. These keywords become function definition in Calabash part as in Ruby so if you want to define a new function you must type a unique Cucumber definition. However, if some of your steps are in same structure you can use same function but you must send some unique part as parameter in double quota like "this". Calabash understand that "this" keyword is used as parameter in the same function. See the following example:

When I press "sign-up" button

Calabash suggests the following function. This function takes button text as parameter to perform suitable action. To be not to fail this function should be generic and you always be sure that you are sending correct type of object reference like button id, button text, hint, or xpath, css, etc for web applications.

When(/^I press "(.*?)" button$/) do |button|

Some times some of the message, id, hint are likely to change or long text is not suitable to put directly in to the code. You create new module which you can store this kind of object in this file.

Then I should see "Sign-up" page

the following function are written for this step:

Then(/^I should see "(.*?)" page$/) do |page|
    query "TextView marked:'#{Messages.pages[page]}'"
end

with referencing class and hash we can reach the related object as Messages.pages[page] for the following module:

If we write the following login.feature as follows:

Regarding the features of Cucumber and Calabash as I defined above, we can write the Calash functions generic so that it cover new test cases as following:

finally, code is ready for new test cases, so we can write sign_up.feature file without requiring any code addiction to calabash_steps.rb. With this way, we will use efficiently Ruby, Cucumber, Calabash. This structure can also be used for Capybara projects. You can also write your functions for your frequently using test scenarios instead of writing it again it the utils.rb module. For preparing pre-condition of a test case, it's better to write some database script to handle this kind of jobs. Like in this blog, add user as "mesut-test", "mesut" via database before re-running the test case. This actualy means that every your case should be deterministic so that one failure should effect only the test case running the other test case should be isolated from the of previously run test cases.

You can pull my repo from githup and run it on your own machines. If you don't have configuration, you can read this post. Please don't hesitate to comment on my mistakes :)

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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