UI Testing and BDD

Recently I had an opportunity to automate UI testing of the web application we have developed. So I found this excellent UI testing framework Splinter. It being written in Python I was instantly confortable.

# From Splinter's website
from splinter import Browser

 with Browser() as browser:
     url = "http://www.google.com"
     browser.visit(url)
     browser.fill('q', 'splinter python acceptance testing')
     button = browser.find_by_name('btnG')
     button.click()
     if browser.is_text_present('splinter.cobrateam.info'):
         print "Yes, the official website was found!"
     else:
         print "No, it wasn't found... We need to improve"

Ah well sweet. It supports multiple webdrivers including remote. So it's possible to integrate it with saucelabs which makes it possible to test on web browsers which are not on your dev box.

Also that you have access to live browser session in Python makes it even more pleasant.

I happened to read on BDD or (Behavior-driven development) and then soon stumbled upon behave. It's good idea to use it for testing as it provides nice seperation in test cases implementation and test cases. It uses The Gherkin language to describe testing scenarios.

Something like below which even non tech person in your team can write

Feature: SEO Test

    Scenario: Search Google for Splinter
        When I visit "http://google.com"
        And I fill in "q" with "Splinter Python"
        And I press "btnG"
        Then I should see "splinter.cobrateam" within 5 seconds 

    Scenario: Search Google for Shekhar's Blog 
        # would fail
        When I visit "http://google.com"
        And I fill in "q" with "Shekhar Tiwatne"
        And I press "btnG"
        Then I should see "shon.github.io" within 5 seconds 

Environment Setup

To make things easier

pip install --upgrade splinter behave behaving
mkdir -p features/steps
touch features/steps/__init__.py
wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/shon/90ac6af750b575cde050/raw/e89262dd5f722dcc1d83d37c011283330c31e9fc/environment.py
mv environment.py features

Create features/steps/everything.py with below code. It essentially imports steps implementation.

from behave import step
from behaving.web.steps import *
from behaving.personas.steps import *

Run

We are ready. Simply execute behave and see firefox window executing all tests for you. You should see one test passed and one failed as intended.

::

: behave

What next

Read how to implement steps (grammer) here.