Selenium Grid Execution using my own framework

Question

I have developed a micro-framework in Java which does the following function:

1. All test cases list will be in a MS-Access database along with test data for the Application to be tested
2. I have created multiple classes and each having multiple methods with-in them. Each of these methods represent a test-case.
3. My framework will read the list of test cases marked for execution from Access and dynamically decide which class/method to execute based on reflection.
4. The framework has methods for sendkeys, click and all other generic methods. It takes care of reporting in Excel.

All this works fine without any issue.

Now I am looking to run the test cases across multiple machines using Grid. I read in many sites that we need a framework like TestNG to have this in Grid. But I hope that it could be possible to integrate Grid in my own framework. I have read many articles and e-books which does not explain the coding logic for this.

• I will be using only windows 7 with IE. I don't need cross browser/os testing.
• I can make any changes to the framework to accomplish this. So please feel free.

In the Access DB which I mentioned above, I will have details about test case and the machine in which the test case should run. Currently users can select the test cases they want to run locally in the Access DB and run it.

How will my methods(test scripts) know which machine its going to be executed? What kind of code changes I should do apart from using RemoteWebDriver and Capabilities?

Please let me know if you need any more information on my code or have any question. Aslo kindly correct me if any of my understanding on Grid is wrong.

Answer 1

How will my methods know which machine it is going to be executed? - You just need to know one machine with a grid setup - the ip of your hub machine. The hub machine will decide where to send the request to from the nodes that are registered with, depending upon the capabilities you specify while instantiating the driver. When you initialize the RemoteWebDriver instance, you need to specify the host (ip of your hub). I would suggest to keep the hub ip as a configurable property.

The real use of the grid is for parallel remote execution. So how do you make your tests run in parallel is a thing that you need to decide. You can use a framework like Testng which provides parallelism with simple settings. You might need to restructure your tests to accomodate testng. The other option would be to implement multithreading yourself to trigger your tests in parallel. I would recommend testng based on my experience since it provides many more capabilities apart from parallelism. You need to take care that each instance of driver is specific to your thread and not a global variable.

All tests can hit the hub and the hub can take care of the rest.

Answer 2

It is important to remember that Grid does not execute your tests in parallel for you. It is the job of your framework to divide tests across multiple threads and collate the results . It is also key to realise that when running on Grid, the test script still executes in the machine the test was started on. Grid provides a REST API to open and interact with browsers, so your test will be using this rather than opening a browser locally. Any other non-selenium code will be executed within the context of the original machine not machine where the browser has been opened (e.g. File System access is not where the browser has opened). Any use of static classes and globals in your framework may also cause issues as each test will acces these concurrently. Your code must be thread safe.

Hopefully this hasn't put you off using Grid. It is an awesome tool and really easy to use. It is the parallel execute which is hard and frameworks such as TestNG provide this out of the box.

Good luck with your framework.