Robot Framwork and Selenium- test automation

Installing Robot, Ride and Selenium

This is a description and basic tutorial to install Robot on a Ubuntu machine. To install a web-test setup for Robot do the following:

1. Refer to the following sites and download the latest versions:

Robot Framework
http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/

Ride GUI
http://code.google.com/p/robotframework-ride/

Selenium Plugin
http://code.google.com/p/robotframework-seleniumlibrary/

2. Extract and Copy: Once downloaded, extract and copy all folders to a folder called e.g. /opt/dev/robot

3. Install Robot and all libraries: In each folder run

sudo python setup.py install

4. Start GUI – run the following script to start creating tests:

ride.py

Components in Robot

Tests in Robot are organised in

• Folders containing
• Test Suites containing
• Test Cases, User Keywords, Scalars, List Variables

Keywords are commands used to trigger events. Using Selenium this might be accessing a website, clicking a specific button etc.. User keywords are powerful way to create your own re-usable test commands based on a set of defined keywords. You are allowed to parameterise your user keywords. Great stuff!

Scalars may be understood as variables such as URLs or default parameters passed to web forms e.g.

Setting up a test environment

We now want to create a simple test suite which visits Google.com, searches for Robot Framework and checks if results exist. Before we set up all basic test components we need to define a constant value for the Google URL. To do so, right click on Resources and select New Scalar. Enter ${GOOGLEURL} for name and http://www.google.com as Value.

Creating a Test Suite

Setting up a basic test suite which loads up Google:

1. Click on File -> open Folder, create a new one and give it the name “Google”

2. Right Click on the folder and select “Add Suite”. Give it the Name “Google Test”

3. Right Click on the Suite and create three test cases: Initial, Load Google, Finally

Now, your setup should look something like this:

Test Setup in Ride

Loading Resources and Libraries
First we will add the Selenium Library: Click on the Google Test Suite and choose Add Library on the Edit Tab. Here you’ll need to enter the path to the Selenium library. In my case this is

/opt/dev/robot/robotframework-seleniumlibrary-2.7/src/SeleniumLibrary

Then we will add our recently created GOOGLEURL Scalar to the suite. Click Add Resource and enter the path to the constant file. If you do not want to remember and type the whole path, you might want to head back to the constants file, copy the path and paste it in here. Now, we’re ready to create our simple test!

Creating a simple test

Now, we’re going to create our basic testing. Therefore I’m going to use a number of keywords implemented in the Selenium library. A documentation about these keywords may be found here: http://robotframework-seleniumlibrary.googlecode.com/hg/doc/SeleniumLibrary.html?r=2.7 Of course you may create your own keywords.

1. We need to start the Selinum Server: The keyword to do this is – surprise – Start Selenium Server. Add this to your initial test case.

Start Selenium Server

2. Then we’re going to visit Google in Firefox:

Open Browser    ${GOOGLEURL}

3. Let’s wait until the search field is present. The id of the input field is ‘lst-ib’:

Page Should Contain Element    lst-ib

According to the Selenium Library Documentation the identifier may be the id of an element, its XPath locator etc.
4. Now fill the field with “Robot Framework”:

Input Text    lst-ib    Robot Framework

5. Wait for the page to contain “code.google.com/p/robotframework/”

Wait Until Page Contains code.google.com/p/robotframework/

We’re now ready to run the test. To do so, we hit the small brown “run” icon in the tool bar and we’ll see: it works just fine

Test successfully completed

Enhancements

Robot creates a log and report for each test-run. If a test fails, a screenshot is being created and integrated into the html report. You are, of course, able to trigger the creation of screenshots or source code logging. Also, using the Wait For Condition keywords you are able to run an almost unlimited amount of JavaScript based tests on your website. Have a look at the Selenium docs – there is a huge amount of keywords to be used.

An easy to use testing tool

Robot is a nice and easy to use tool – we’re not using it to integrate into CI. We’re just running stand-alone tests. But it’s really handy when it comes to handle a huge number of test cases: For example we were testing the behaviour of search functionality of one of our websites. With robot I was able to fire hundreds of request against the search and get screenshots in return for further manual investigation. Also we’re using it to autmatically test dependencies of our content trees in huge navigational structures. For this kind of test Robot is perfectly suited.

You are now able to place QR codes on your ticket prints to allow closing them using your smart phone. This is currently really just a simple feature: A small php script which needs to have access to the Trac database, simply takes a project name for database connection and a ticket and sets its status to closed / resolved. In the future I’ll add a nice mobile interface to allow adding comments / changing status etc. The configuration is quite simple: You just need to add the URL of the webserver running the script to your printer.properties file and configure your projects in the ticket_closer.php script if the project name differs from your database name. That’s it. Maybe somebody will love this feature just as I do!

QR Codes on ticket prints allow quick closing

It is available on Github:

https://github.com/mmuell23/TracPrinter

There is some documentation in the wiki. Basically you may configure the tool in several ways:

• define, which field of the ticket will be displayed on the card
• define sizes, paddings, distances, …

It is possible to run the tool either as a stand-alone application or as a Java applet on your web-environment.

This is what a ticket card will look like: In my exampe, it shows the name of the sprint in the header area, the ticket number and summary in the content area below and some information about the reporter, owner and URL in Trac.

Maybe somebody finds it as useful as I do

Wie man diese ganz schnell und unkompliziert einfangen und evtl. dann auf sie einwirken kann, zeigt der Artikel Teamstimmung sichtbar machen bei projekt-log.de. Finde ich eine schöne und nützliche Idee.

• The Daily Scrum: Was ist das, wer ist da, was wird besprochen, was sind die Regeln. All das hier – http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html
• Die vierte Frage im Daily Scrum: mit einer Frage nach der Risikoeinschätzung der Goalerreichung eines jeden Entwicklers kann man schnell Impeditments identifizieren – http://www.projekt-log.de/allgemein/die-vierte-frage/
• Statt 15 Minuten könnte das Daily Scrum 30 Minuten dauern – dafür mit Spaß. Vielleicht eher für Teams, die sonst keinen Spaß haben – http://www.gettingagile.com/2009/12/09/the-daily-15-minutes-of-fun/
• Jeff Sutherland’s Nokia Test: Machen wir eigentlich Scrum? – http://jeffsutherland.com/nokiatest.pdf
• Kanban schnell erklärt. Ein netter kleiner Screencast zum Thema “Was ist eigentlich Kanban?” – http://www.it-agile.de/kanban-screencast.html
• Wie kann man Kanban und Scrum effektiv nutzen? Hier gibt es ein Buch zum Download. Es behandelt die Gemeinsamkeiten von Scrum und Kanban – sehr interessant, wenn man sowohl den Betrieb und Wartung bestehender Anwendungen als auch die Entwicklung neuer Produkte im Portfolio hat. Echt ein gutes Buch. – http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/kanban-scrum-minibook
• Scrum vs. Kanban: Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten in der Einführung und Durchsetzung; wie ändert und verbessert welche Methode Prozesse. “… Scrum mit WIP und Visualisierung anzureichern, wird helfen, die Effektivität der Sprint-Verpflichtung zu verbessern …” – http://www.microtool.de/blog/post/Gedanken-uber-die-Unterschiede-zwischen-Kanban-und-Scrum.aspx
• Das intelligente Scrum Board: Nettes Tool http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2010/12/scrum-board-on-steroids-awesome-nature.html
• “How to convince your CxO to use Scrum – Part 1″: Beginn einer Serie mit einem ersten interessanten Artikel zum Thema: Welchen Business Value hat ein frühzeitig abgebrochenes Projekt bei klassischem “Wassefall-Vorgehen” vs. Scrum: http://scrumalliance.org/articles/326-how-to-convince-your-cfo-or-cxo-to-use-agile-or-scrum
• Warum die logische Annahme, dass der Projektmanager der Scrum Master sein sollte nicht unbeding richtig ist. http://learnsoftwareprocesses.com/2010/10/09/how-is-the-role-of-a-project-manager-different-from-the-role-of-scrum-master/
• Sind Story Points das gleiche wie Complexity Points? http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/07/story-points-complexity-effort
• Scrum Glossar für Developer. Die wichtigsten Begriffe erklärt: http://alaverdyan.com/readme/2010/12/scrum-developers-glossary/

In fact, I re-designed and implemented the algorithm to find and highlight XML-tags from scratch. It is now much faster in searching and highlighting.

All other features like

- counting search results
- highlighting marked words throughout the document
- integrating a meld-interface to compare / diff opened files

remain as they are. Feel free to download the plug-in at Github.

Es funktioniert erstaunlich flüssig und erlaubt alle Mausaktionen mit einfach zu lernenden Gesten. Die Verbindung über UMTS ist aber doch recht langsam, zumindest in meinen ersten Tests. Die Maus auf meinem Laptop bewegte sich ziemlich verzögert, während mein iPhone den Zeiger bereits an der richtigen Position wähnte. Im WLAN sieht das sicher anders aus.

During the past few weeks I extended gedit by several little plug-ins that I needed to have for my daily developer work. Now, I merged all those to one single configurable plug-in called gedittools.

It comes along with the following features:

• XML highlighting: After hitting the highlighting button in the tool bar, the complete tree inside the file will be highlighted. Depending on depth different colors will be used.
• Selection highlighting: After a double click on any word, all occurrances of the selected word will be highlighted throughout the whole current document.
• Search selection count: After a double click on any word, all occurrances of the selected word will be counted and the sum will be displayed in the status bar of the document.
• Launch meld to compare files: A button is added to the toolbar of gedit to allow launching meld. Therefore a screen will be displayed: It allows selection of a file which will be compared to the current active file in gedit.

The plug-in is configurable: You can choose which plug-in you want to use. To make use of the meld launcher feature, an installation of meld is required. Refer to the README file for details.

git clone http://github.com/mmuell23/mmuell23.git
cp -r mmuell23/gedittools/* ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins

Install from zip File:

You might also download the plug-in as a zip file from github. Hit the “download source” button on the top right of the site.

Extract all files and copy to ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins

Activate plug-in in gedit preferences and configure it as you wish.

I needed a diff tool to compare two files that are currently opened in gedit. Unfortunately, gedit doesn’t come along with these kind of features. So, another plug-in was needed.

Meldlauncher

What it does? It simply starts the open source diff & merge tool Meld using two documents opened in gedit. That’s why I called it meldlauncher. Therefore, if you want to use meldlauncher, you will need to have Meld installed. On Ubuntu do something like this:

sudo apt-get install meld

If there are only two documents opened in gedit, meldlauncher will launch Meld and pass those two files to it. If there are more than two documents opened, meldlauncher will open a selection dialog from which you can easily choose the document to compare the current document with.

I moved both the counter plug-in and the meldlauncher plug-in to Github. Feel free to grab it from there:

http://github.com/mmuell23/mmuell23