Ruby Acceptance Testing Quickstart

Web acceptance testing - where do you start? This is a quickstart project with good practice that you can clone and extend, rather than having to google constantly to find out the basics. There's some very powerful stuff included in this project which is ready to use out of the box, including parallel execution, browserstack integration, and aliased random data persistence.

Features

Acceptance tests written in plain English
Page Object pattern
Parallel test execution
Test data persistence across cucumber step definitions
Powerful DSLs to enforce good practice and terse code
Switchable drivers / browsers
BrowserStack support for remote execution
Headless browser testing
Aliased and randomised data generation to prevent data collisions
Rake execution tasks

Dependencies

Make sure you have the following installed before starting:

Ruby (preferably with RVM)
Ruby bundler gem
Phantom.js
Firefox (optional)
Chromedriver (optional)

If you're using OSX, Phantom.js and Chromedriver are available via Homebrew.

Key Tools

Ruby - a dynamic, simple programming language.
Rake - a build utility for Ruby.
Cucumber - a BDD tool for writing acceptance tests in plain English.
Capybara - a driver-agnostic web acceptance test framework and DSL.
SitePrism - a page object DSL for Capybara.
Poltergeist - a Capybara driver for the headless browser Phantom.js.
Selenium WebDriver - Browser automation framework.
BrowserStack - Platform as a service based cross browser/OS test execution.
RSpec Expectations - a powerful assertions DSL.
Parallel_Tests - A gem for parallel threading of cucumber tests.
Factory Girl - A data template factory for producing test data.
FFaker - A random data generation library.
Relish - Automatic feature documention generation for Cucumber

Installing and using

From the command line:

Clone the project: git clone https://github.com/burythehammer/ruby-acceptance-testing-quickstart
Navigate to the folder and bundle install to install all necessary gems.
Start running tests using the available rake tasks.

Available Rake Tasks

rake demo will run a headless browser test.

rake parallel_demo will execute a demo parallel test.

To specify your browser, use the following (hopefully self-explanatory) tasks:

rake firefox
rake chrome
rake phantomjs
rake parallel_firefox
rake parallel_chrome
rake parallel_phantomjs

Or if you wish to run every browser, you can run rake crossbrowser.

Browserstack Configuration

Browserstack is available via rake browserstack. You will need to set up your environment variables via the .env file first, to specify your login credentials and required browser/OS. To use this as part of a secure CI environment, Browserstack have an excellent guide on their website to keep your credentials secure.