LRR/test/SeleniumIbrahim/test_kit/README.md

Important notes

Before executing this test suite, there are several things need to be setup and taken into considaration.

Setup test environment

These test scripts are written using Python, uses selenium webdriver for automation, and pytest for test execution and reporting. Hence, you have to install Python on your machine, then pip install selenium webdriver and pytest-selenium libraries.

Here we guide you through the installation of selenium and pytest-selenium only assuming that you already have Python environment on your machine. If not, visit the official Python page to download and install Python.

Selenium webdriver

Since Selenium supports many web browsers and each browser has its own webdriver, first you will need to download Google chrome webdriver.

NOTE: Make sure to download the suitable webdriver to your version of Google chrome browser

Then, add the webdriver to your system environment variables so it would be accessible by the scripts without the need to excplicitly attach the webdriver to the test kit directory.
To achieve that:
1- left click on This PC, then choose properties.
2- choose Advanced system settings.
3- choose Environment variables.
4- under System variables double-click on path.
5- choose New, copy and paste path to the downloaded webdriver executable.

NOTE: To avoid problems with long path strings, it is recommended that you create a folder in your C:\ drive such as:
C:\webdriver\bin and append the webdriver executable into it.

To test if everything is working fine, open a command prompt and issue the following command:

C:\> chromedriver

You should get something like the following:

Starting ChromeDriver 88.0.4324.96 (68dba2d8a0b149a1d3afac56fa74648032bcf46b-refs/branch-heads/4324@{#1784}) on port 9515
Only local connections are allowed.
Please see https://chromedriver.chromium.org/security-considerations for suggestions on keeping ChromeDriver safe.
ChromeDriver was started successfully.

After that, pip install selenium library using the following command on your command prompt:

C:\> pip install selenium

That is all for selenium, next we guide you through installing pytest-selenium.

Pytest-selenium

Simply, on a command prompt issue the following command:

C:\ pip install pytest-selenium

For more details about pytest-selenium visit this page.

Text files descriptions

As you have noticed already, there are several .txt files in the test kit folder, namely:

• course_code.txt
• DUMMY_SUBMISSION.txt
• Error_log.txt
• student_ids.txt
• Test_Users.txt

Each file is essential to the automation operation in some sense, for example course_code.txt works as a short-term memory to store course codes created by the automation scripts in some test cases that needed to be used later in a subsequent test cases that requires the same course code to successfully run the test case. And DUMMY_SUBMISSION.txt that is used as a dummy file to be submitted during execution of lab report submission test case.
Error_log.txt is used for debugging and keeping track of problems encountered during test execution.
student_ids.txt is a static memory to store several student IDs pre-inserted into student_data table of lrr database and used by signup test case automation.
Test_Users.txt not used by the scripts, but contains two main system actors, namely, instructor and student accounts credentials that is provided manually inside the test scripts to carry out different operations for different system users.

Running the test suite

NOTE: Before running the test suite make sure that you have followed these instructions on how to install and run LRR on your machine.

On the same local directory of your branch of LRR, and after you have done your contribution to the source code whether it is a bug fix or a feature integration and before committing your changes, you should run this regression test suite to prevent the addition of new bugs to the source code, and to ensure master repo consistency.

Open a command prompt and issue the following command:

C:\ pytest --html test_report_xxxx_yyyy.html

The option --html tells pytest to generate an HTML test report with test execution results, which is useful and later must be provided before merging new pull requests to master repo.
test_report_xxxx_yyyy.html is the name of the HTML file to be generated after the completion of test execution. Where xxxx stands for the date string, for example 10032021 translates to March 3rd 2021, and yyyy stands for now time of test execution, for example 1955 translates to 19:55.
After running the command and if everything is setup correctly, you should see series of web automations for different main functions of LRR.
Finally, an HTML test report file will be generated just like the example test report in the test kit folder example_test_report_09032021_1927.html.