A simple way to rerun failed cucumber scenarios

In a recent project failing cucumber scenarios due to unreliable environments were a very common occurrence. I ran a set of tests and there were failures, then I ran them again a minute a later and they were all green! This became very frustrating. These failures where normally in the form of timeouts due to an ever increasing load on the app box. Obviously my first reaction was to speak to the team responsible for the environment and try to get the problems resolved but due to limited time and resource nothing could be done immediately.

So while I was waiting for further hardware to be thrown at the environment I decided to use the cucumber rerun formatter.

For this demonstration we need to have a feature which has a scenario that passes and a scenario that fails.

Feature: Rerun formatter

Scenario: Test that Passes
 Given I have 1 pound
 When I add 2 pounds 
 Then I should see 3 pounds

Scenario: Test that Fails
 Given I have 1 pound
 When I add 2 pounds 
 Then I should see 4 pounds

So lets try and rerun that failed scenario. On the command line add the formatters pretty and rerun so it looks like this:

$ cucumber features/retest.feature -f pretty -f rerun --out rerun.txt

After you have executed this you will have noticed that a rerun.txt file has appeared in the root directory of your project, if you open that you can see that the failed test has been recorded, now we need to rerun that failed test.

$ cucumber features/retest.feature -f pretty -f rerun --out rerun.txt || cucumber @rerun.txt

Notice that the cucumber will run through the 2 scenarios as normal then it will rerun the failed scenario. The || means that the cucumber will execute the rerun text file if a failure has occurred, if you replace the || with ; cucumber will execute the rerun every time.

$ cucumber features/retest.feature -f pretty -f rerun --out rerun.txt ; cucumber @rerun.txt

If you are experiencing problems with failing tests this rerun should not be the first thing you implement. Investigate the reason for the failures and try your upmost to get them fixed. I would only recommend using rerun for this kind of scenario if all else has failed.

 

How to install ChromeDriver on Centos 6.5 using vagrant

Recently I was asked to run some automated tests using vagrant and Centos 6.5, both technologies were new to me and at first glance this task was going to be a little difficult as ChromeDriver is not supported in Centos 6.5. Unfortunately there is very little documentation on how to get around this issue on the web, this is a post of my findings.

Getting started with Ruby, Cucumber and Capybara

Since I started in test automation I have always been asked by fellow testers ‘How can I set up my machine so I can start writing automated tests?’. When I first started out I also asked this very question.

There are lots of great resources out there which help to answer the above question but sometimes it can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. I have found many articles that are very technical and sometimes tailored towards users who have an existing development background, this post is for those guys who don’t.
Here is my guide to setting up a simple cucumber project on a mac, there will no doubt be other ways and possibility better ways, but this is how I have done it and I have found it to be very effective.