Multiple concurrent browser tests with watir-webdriver through different browsers

Question

so I'm working on a website here and I would like to run multiple browser tests at one time. What I mean by this is it should perform my smoke tests on ie, firefox and chrome at the same time and report back each browser results. I'm currently only testing with ie with rpsec and watir-webdriver but would like to automate for the other 2 browsers. Are there any existing gems out there (I haven't been able to find any), if not what would be the best way to go around solving this issue?

Answer 1

You should try WatirGrid .

It won't make all the work for you but it will give you a platform to launch multiple tests at once. The you can just launch the same test 3 times changing the target browser and the grid will handle where they will be executed.

Answer 2

Why don't need anything except watir-webdriver to run multiple browsers on the same machine.

ie = Watir::Browser.new :ie
firefox = Watir::Browser.new :firefox
chrome = Watir::Browser.new :chrome
opera = Watir::Browser.new :opera

Answer 3

If you have multiple machines or VMs to work with, Jenkins in the answer. My approach is similar to Chuck's, but instead of a flat configuration file I let Jenkins prompt for these values via drop-down menu, etc. Jenkins is easy to set up and can automatically distribute test jobs to any available machine for testing.

So, I click "Google Search Test" and select "Internet Explorer"... then I do the same thing and select a different browser. Concurrent tests in various browsers, with HTML/email output and a great log history.

I'll also be writing more about this, but I'm still on vacation!

Here is an example of configuration file (these assign default values if for example Jenkins is not used to launch them). NOTE: "||=" means "if nil, use this value. If not nil, use the current value". I'm only setting values if Jenkins has not already.

ENV['BROWSER'] ||= "firefox"

ENV['ENVIRONMENT'] ||= "qa"

ENV['LIMIT'] ||= "10"

ENV['DISTRICT'] ||= "any"

ENV['TYPE'] ||= "pkg-new"

# Not necessary, but added for sanity/cleanliness:
$type = ENV['TYPE'].downcase
$browser = ENV['BROWSER'].downcase
$env = ENV['ENVIRONMENT'].downcase
$district = ENV['DISTRICT'].downcase

puts "\t** Testing #{$env.upcase} using #{$browser.upcase}... **"

The Jenkins portion is surprisingly easy - so easy I didn't think it was set up. You create a Variable for your script, and whatever you name the variable becomes ENV["VariableName"] - and is immediately available to your script.

So I have a variable named "BROWSER" that is set by a drop down with Firefox, IE and Chrome options. The user has no room to confuse the script with free text, and they can run a custom test whenever they want. My Devs/PMs/Users love me :D.

Answer 4

If you want to run the exact same test code for the tests you will need to externalize the browser type, either as an environment variable, or a YAML file or somesuch.

Ruby has some stuff that makes dealing with yaml files super easy (I need to write a blog posting on this) so you can put something at the top of your script that calls a method to get the config info and then set the browser type accordingly.

In my testconfig.yml YAML file I have:

global:
    browser: ie               #possible values: ie, ff, chrome

note I don't currently test against opera (market segment too small) or it would be in the list of possible values. The comment is just there to make life easy on whoever might have to edit that file.

I have a read_config method defined in a readconfig.rb file which looks (in part) like this

require 'yaml'

def read_config
  config = YAML.load_file('testconfig.yml')
  $browser_type = config['global']['browser']
end

And at the top of my tests there is code like this

require 'rubygems'
require 'readconfig'
require 'watir-webdriver'
read_config

$browser = Watir::Browser.new $browser_type.to_sym

This way I can have a different config file on each system (which also sets up a lot of other things like the current passwords (changed on a regular basis), which test environment to use, and settings for each environment for stuff like the test server URL's, database server and name, etc. When developing tests a simple change to the config file lets me run all the tests facing a given browser. or if I want to run in parallel I can have the systems setup with their own customized config file, let them pull the current scripts from source control, and then run them against whatever browser, server etc is configured in the config file.

This is probably dirt simple stuff to any accomplished ruby dev, but it's like magic for any of us new to ruby, and especially for getting hard-coded values OUT of my scripts and into one single place where I can control and change them.