Testing with Selenium Webdriver, Visual Studio and NUnit

Update 20/06/12 – Updated NareshScaler to work with the new IEDriverServer that ships with the latest version of Selenium Webdriver

We have a multi-tenant solution at work.  As we added tenants we were happy to discover that our app scaled nicely, but we were sad to discover that Naresh, our lone QA superstar, did not.  We discovered (unsurprisingly) it wasn’t possible to stick to a fixed release schedule and do regression/integration testing manually.  So some additional automation was required.

Integration Testing Automation Requirements

Our requirements were

1. Naresh could create integration tests with minimum oversight from the team
2. Tests needed to be created quickly without a lot of additional coding
3. Ideally tools would run on Visual Studio

Ruling out Specflow

I’d been keen to investigate Specflow and the BDD style of integration testing.  However, it quickly became apparent that this would require a significant effort in time to successfully wire up the tests, and would require a reasonable amount of dev to ensure each test passed.  Thus failing requirements 1 and 2.

Ruling in Selenium Webdriver

We already had a bit of experience with Selenium and we found this excellent blog post from Stephen Walther.  Reading this we realised that  Selenium Webdriver met our requirements perfectly.  We could install Selenium Webdriver into Firefox and export the scripts as C# Webdriver classes.  We could then add the classes into a simple test-runner and we’d be able to scale Naresh 🙂

Some Selenium Pitfalls

However, it’s not all good news.  One thing to point out is that there can be a certain amount of flakiness when the various selenium drivers are trying to locate elements on your page.  Ie a test will fail once, then pass again later.  This is obviously far from ideal, but overall I think the benefits out-weigh the drawbacks.   Test that fail consistently can be investigated.

One way to minimise these failures would be to run the tests in only one browser, the Firefox driver seems the most reliable.  If you’re not doing loads of Javascript this is probably safe enough.

Introducing NareshScaler

I wrote NareshScaler to allow Naresh to quickly add each Selenium macro into the test-runner.  I’d also been wanting to try out creating a nuget package for a while, so this seemed like a perfect chance to give it a go.

You can install NareshScaler into your Integration Test project using the nuget package manager.  Once successfully installed, you should add your Selenium Webdriver class file(s).

Then simply mark each class as inheriting from NareshScalerTest.

You will now have to override the RunSeleniumTests method.  You simply need to wire up the driver and list any test methods in your selenium Webdriver class, ie:

[TestFixture]
public class NugetOrgTest : NareshScalerTest
{
private IWebDriver driver;
private string baseURL;

[SetUp]
public void SetupTest()
{
baseURL = "http://nuget.org/";
}

public void Test_That_NareshScaler_Exists_On_NugetOrg()
{
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl(baseURL + "/");
driver.FindElement(By.Id("searchBoxInput")).Clear();
driver.FindElement(By.Id("searchBoxInput")).SendKeys("NareshScaler");
driver.FindElement(By.Id("searchBoxSubmit")).Click();
driver.FindElement(By.LinkText("Naresh Scaler")).Click();
}

public override void RunSeleniumTests(IWebDriver webDriver)
{
driver = webDriver;
Test_That_NareshScaler_Exists_On_NugetOrg();
}
}

We use NUnit here, so once everything is wired up, you should be able to point NUnit at your Integration Tests dll and see all your tests running in IE, Firefox and Chrome  Which I have to admit is pretty cool when you see everything running automatically.

Additionally NareshScaler includes an Nant build file, to allow you to wire up your integration tests into CruiseControl etc.  I’ve added a sample, so you can hopefully see how it works.  Hope you find it useful.