When
I start setting up the test environment for the functional tests I
decided to use Selenium RC. The development of the test scripts was
decided to be made in Java and the obvious choice for the testing
framework was the Junit. After couple of months in development it
came to my attention that there was another testing framework that
offered more choices than Junit was. The test framework was TestNG
and the decision for switching the framework was made after
considering two major factors. The first factor was the adaptation of
the existing test scripts to the new framework and the second factor
was the flexibility the new framework offered over Junit.
The
migration to the new framework was a breeze using the eclipse TestNG
pluging refactoring support. The Junit assertions were resolved by
importing org.testng.AssertJUnit.*;
making the transition effortless.
As explained above the decision for changing the frameworks was based on
the flexibility TestNG offered over Junit. For starters the big
difference between the testing frameworks is the purpose designed
for. Junit was designed for unit testing while TestNG for high level
testing. In that sense the capabilities TestNG offers are more
aligned to the needs of a functional tester that the needs of an
application developer. To make things more clear lets see some of the
capabilities TestNG offers that Junit doesn't.
One of the capabilities TestNG offers is the parametric testing. With
this capability placing a parameter in the testng.xml file makes the
parameter reusable in the test scripts. This capability come handy to
our test team in parameterizing the time delay in the
selenium.WaitForPageToLoad(“1000”) statements used in the test
scripts. With the parametrization of the time delay it became easy to
adjust the time delays by changing a file in seconds.
Another capability of the TestNG that Junit does not have is the capability
to rerun failed tests. Although I have not used this capability yet,
it is pretty obvious that if you have a test suite taking hours to
execute; its time saving to rerun only failed tests without
re-executing the suite.
One
the TestNG capabilities extensively used in our test cases is the
capability to depend test steps on other test step. In this way when
one of the dependencies fail then the tests depending on the failed
one are marked as skipped and not as failed. In this case by making
our test steps dependent on the preconditions (@Beforelass) we bind
the tests to the preconditions. In this way we know that if one of
the preconditions fail the test is not considered failed but skipped.
TestNG
is an easy to install and use testing framework. You can use it with
Eclipse and lately with Netbeans. Documentation can be found at: http://testng.org/
To
generate nice reports you can use ReportNG you can find more
information on setting up and using ReportNG to the following:
For
maven users there is a blog by Marcin
Zajączkowski explaining how to setup reportng using maven.
