Deploying Selenium RC tests with Teamcity

Question

I'm looking at setting up my Selenium tests in a QA environment, which will run with a TeamCity build each time.

This seems to be the best resource I've come across so far, where someone has gone through most of their own process, but I can see just by looking around that there are a whole heap of different possible methods.

https://yetanotherchris.dev/tools/using-team-city-for-staging-and-test-builds-with-asp-net-and-selenium/

I have Selenium RC tests written, which I'm able to run locally in Nunit with no dramas so I'd like to take this approach however if we have QA server with Nunit installed, which is triggered by TeamCity, are there any issues with Browsers opening and things like that, I need to consider if I'm not actually logged in to my QA server?

I'm interested to hear from anyone, who has done a similar thing as I'm just in the early stages of trying to set this all up and it would be great to avoid making mistakes others may have already made and overcome.

Answer 1

I have a somewhat similar setup, however we decouple our non unit tests (Anything requiring an install to a server) from the typical unit tests which can run directly on the team city build server. In my solution we created a windows service polling team city for new builds via the rest API and when we find a new build we add it to the queue to execute our automation against. The executable we use to kick off the automation is executed on a remote machine so we can be running lots of tests simultaneously (we have many projects and branches with a lot of builds throughout the day). On the remote client the first thing we do is install our build (for web sites or services) on a server machine, then execute nunit to run all of our automated tests.

Some pros of this approach is that you have a little more control over the environment, you don't have to have iis and sql installed on the build servers and you don't have to hold up the builds for long periods of time because it's waiting on UI automation to complete.

Some cons are that you don't get automation results as part of team city's built in reporting (including code coverage) so you will need an alternate way of reporting on the results.

Hope that helps, if you have specific questions feel free to ask.