Automatic Selenium screenshot with TestNg, Maven and Jenkins CI

Recently I was working on the automatisation of Selenium tests.
We have built a pretty classical stack for running test:

1. Jenkins master - main entry point and orchestrator of the build
2. Jenkins swarm client on a Windows 8 PC with IE 11 - where the builds are executed
3. Maven Surfire Plugin
4. TestNg
5. Selenium

One of the problem I encountered was not very user-friendly alert about failed tests. Jenkins send an email with a link to the unstable build. No details about failed tests, no exceptions, just a link. So I need to open my laptop, turn on my VPN, go to Jenkins server and see the details.

Too many steps.

It would be great to get a detailed alert. It's not a problem with Jenkins' Editable Email Notification and special token ${FAILED_TESTS}. This token will bring in your email detailed information about failed test. I love stacktraces, but for normal people it's a mess and frankly speaking it takes some time to understand what's going on even for a geek. 

So my idea was to send a screenshot of every failed test within Jenkins alert notification. So this way, it takes a second to see the broken page and understand the root cause.

For this we will need to use the following tricks:

1.  org.testng.TestListenerAdapter.onTestFailure is triggered when a test is failed.
2.  org.openqa.selenium.TakesScreenshot takes a screenshot
3.  copy the screenshot to maven target folder for further usage
4.  use Jenkins Editable Email Notification/Attachments feature

First 3 steps are already implemented in this maven project - https://github.com/yev/seleniumMvnScreenshot
To use it you need to add the following dependency in your pom.xml file which holds the selenium tests.

          
      com.github.yev
      screenshot
      1.0
    

The 4 step is only about jenkins config:

                               

Go to your Jenkins job configuration 

Modify the regexp path to match your maven project holding the selenium test

  

Post your comments here or in my twitter if you have some questions or idea to improve this stuff.

Automatic environment setup for Mac OS X developers

This post covers the subject of how to setup the automatic project infrastructure startup for users working on Mac OS X.

Introduction

This article will be useful for those who are working on the projects combining multiple technologies. In my case the project includes Xmpp server, Rtmp server, ElasticSearch, MySQL, Ruby on Rails application, Memcached. All of this technologies are running in a separate terminal (terminal tab). So when I start my working day I should always repeat the same actions by running each of those services. To be more productive and don't spend my time by re-typing many times the same commands, I automated the creation of development environment.

Concept

The key tool for such automatisation is iTerm.app 

One powerful features of iTerm is profile. In our case, one profile - one server/service.

My solution consists of the following parts:
1. iTerm2
2. zsh + ohMyZsh
3. iTerm Profiles
4. iTerm Window saving mechanism

Implementation

1. Open iTerm.

2. For each technology (server) we will create a specific profile:

In this screenshot I've created a profile for Rails server. Before server start I want to show the state of my git repo.

3. Then, for newly created profile we will define some useful hot keys for server restart or trigger the rebuild, followed by restart, etc:

4. How do you manage the error messages which occur in different terminals/tabs? Well, in my case, I should go tab by tab and look into the logs... Annoying, no? It would be better, if I could be notified automatically by Growl or something like that with error message and service name which produced the error. There is a nice hack for this. We will use a feature of iTerm Profile which is called Triggers (select Profile -> Advanced -> Triggers -> Edit). Then you should specify 3 parameters:

•  regexp expression which identify the error entry for a particular service. For example, for my java based XMPP server, this regexp is simple 'ERROR'.
• Action to be taken when regexp is occurred in the tab. You have many options there. Play sound, run a cmd, show growl notification, bounce dock icon, etc.
• finally the optional parameter for the action you choose in the previous step. For example, for Growl notification it will be a text to be showed.

5. Now it's time to group all the profiles, set them properly as tabs, assign a different color for each. When it's done, we need to save this configuration. Window -> Save Window Arrangement.

Now each time you need to start working on this project, you simple go to Window -> Restore Window Arrangement and voila all the project env is up and you are ready to work in less the 2 seconds.

For those lucky developers, who are using multiple computers, like iMac at the office and MacBook at home, you can reuse the iTerm config with all setups iTerm -> Preferences -> General -> Preferences -> Load preferences from a custom folder or URL. You specify your Dropbox/Google disk folder and you can restore it from another computer.