Selenium test reporting with maven surefire report plugin

If you are familiar with Junit, you may have already known the maven surefire plugin which enables running unit test inside maven build cycles. Normally, surefire plugin generates the XML test reports at /target/surefire-reports directory. If you use selenium RC integrated with your build system or as a separate test framework, you may use maven-selenium-plugin coupled with the surefire plugin to launch your tests.
As far as I know, there are two ways to generate test reports when selenium is coupled with maven.

1. Use LoggingSelenium java library to generate HTML test reports with screenshots

2. Use maven-surefire-report plugin

This post is about the latter one, maven-surefire-report plugin.

The default configuration of surefire-report-plugin is trivial. You just need to add a <reporting> element to projects' pom.xml as follows.

<reporting>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <
<configuration>
<outputDirectory>${basedir}/target/wso2qa</outputDirectory>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</reporting>


When you run mvn surefire-report:report goal after running the tests, HTML based descriptive report will be created at the specified output directory. In this mechanism, you do not use anything specific to selenium,but get the advantage of surefire report plugin in test reporting.

How to pass system properties to maven surefire plugin test run

While developing WSO2 QA test framework (which is based on selenium RC), we wanted to give users the choice of selecting test cases without running whole suite at once. Our plan was to pass a system property during maven test run. However, passing a system property directly through command line does not work since the surefire plugin is run under a different JVM instance that is launched by Maven.
In order to overcome this, maven surefire plugin can be configured as follows by specifying the required system property.

<systemProperties>
<property>
<name>test.suite</name>
<value>${test.suite}</value>
</property>
</systemProperties>

According to this example configuration, we can run test suite with passing a system property as follows.

'mvn clean install -Dtest.suite=test-case'

Automated testing of wso2 products using Selenium

I have never been a fan of open source UI test automation tools due to the annoying issues of majority of them. Most of the tools provides you with a good first user experience however fails when try to use in advanced use cases. At WSO2, we have been looking for a test automation tool during the last few years. Due to the tight release schedules, we were not able to focus much on researches.
At the end of 2008, WSO2 started to build its SOA product suite based on revolutionary Carbon platform and a new JSP based UI framework has been designed. When I got the initial builds of new WSO2 carbon products, I was curious about the possibility of automating user interface. I tried with one of the tools which we have tried once but never got a chance to continue working on. That is, Selenium! For me, it is the best open source tool I have used so far in my career.
After the releases of WSO2 carbon based products, we have started to automate UI and functional use cases using Selenium. We are making a rapid and steady progress so far with this great tool.

We use Selenium RC with Junit. All the test are written using Junit. WSO2 products are built using maven2 and eventually our test framework will be integrated to build system. We have already used maven selenium plugin and surefire plugin to integrate our tests with maven. With the power and high flexibility of Selenium we are in a good position of cross browser testing.

While automating the product UIs with selenium, we had to overcome some blocking issues but thanks for the materials available in openQA forums and some nice blogs, we were able to resolve most of them. I'd appreciate Selenium team for their great vision and innovativeness of developing such a helpful free web automation tool.