Load Testing web application with Selenium and TestNG

I’ve used Selenium for while to do verification tests of web applications, recently I discovered a very simple way to use it with TestNG and Maven to do some performance testing. TestNG allows for the use of annotations to allow multi-threading and iterations.

pom.xml:

<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.testng</groupId>
<artifactId>testng</artifactId>
<version>6.8.7</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
<artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
<version>2.44.0</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependencies>

And as for a simple test to get started with… scripting of steps is available online or could be in a future blog post.

/*
* COPYRIGHT. none
*/
package com.example.selenium;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeClass;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;
/**
* Simple test example for Selenium
*/
public class SeleniumTest {

private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(SeleniumTest.class);
/**
* TODO Un-comment or change if needed to set your local path!
*/
@BeforeClass
public void oneTimeSetUp() {
System.out.println(“————————————– init —————————————-“);
//System.setProperty(“webdriver.firefox.bin”,”C:\\path\\to\\firefox.exe”);
}
/**
* NOTE: uses TestNG – behaves differently than JUnit
*/
@Test(invocationCount = 1, threadPoolSize = 5)
public void testLoadApp() {

final String fn = “testLoadApp”;
final String baseUrl = “http://www.giantgeek.com/index.php”;
LOGGER.debug(“[START] Thread Id: {} is started!”, Thread.currentThread().getId());

WebDriver driver = null;
final long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
try{
driver = (WebDriver)new FirefoxDriver();
driver.get(baseUrl);

final String actual = driver.getTitle();
LOGGER.debug(“Page Title is {}”, actual);
final String expected = “GIANTGEEK.COM”;
Assert.assertEquals(actual,expected);
//perform whatever actions, like login, submit form or navigation


}catch(final WebDriverException ex){
LOGGER.warn(fn+":WebDriverException:{}",ex);
}catch(final Exception ex){
LOGGER.warn(fn+":Exception:{}",ex);
}
finally {
final long elapsed = System.currentTimeMillis() - start;
LOGGER.debug("[END] Thread Id: {}, elapsed={}", Thread.currentThread().getId(),elapsed);
if(driver != null){
driver.quit();
}
}
}
}

WARNING: Selenium Tests MAY fail if the browser used for testing is updated in the Operating System. Updating the pom.xml to a newer release usually helps!

REFERENCES:

Maven build script for replacement of text in web.xml (and others)

Automated replacement of BUILD_LABEL token in web.xml <description> with Maven. For JAR’s the replacement is commented out, but can be any file.

NOTE: This proves to be rather difficult to do because of the way that Maven copies resources as it’s building the WAR. The most reliable manner I’ve found (so far) is below, it works by making a .tmp copy of the web.xml in a different path and then later uses it in the WAR.


<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>com.google.code.maven-replacer-plugin</groupId>
<artifactId>replacer</artifactId>
<version>1.5.3</version>
<configuration>
<quiet>false</quiet>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>replaceBuildLabel</id>
<phase>prepare-package</phase>
<goals>
<goal>replace</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<file>${basedir}/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml</file>
<outputFile>${project.build.directory}/web.xml.tmp</outputFile>
<replacements>
<replacement>
<token>BUILD_LABEL</token>
<value>Maven-${maven.build.timestamp}</value>
</replacement>
</replacements>
<regex>false</regex>
<quiet>false</quiet>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.5</version>
<configuration>
<failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml>
<webXml>${project.build.directory}/web.xml.tmp</webXml>
<archive>
<manifest>
<addDefaultImplementationEntries>true</addDefaultImplementationEntries>
<addDefaultSpecificationEntries>true</addDefaultSpecificationEntries>
</manifest>
<manifestEntries>
<url>${project.url}</url>
<Build-Label>${maven.build.timestamp}</Build-Label>
</manifestEntries>
</archive>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>

Most importantly, you will want to have this token in the web.xml file for replacement, the description line is best used for this as such:

<description>ExampleWAR [BUILD_LABEL]</description>

during the build, that value would be replaced to something like:

<description>ExampleWAR [Maven-20141015-1700]</description>

REFERENCES:

Maven/Ant echoproperties at build time

Once you have started using automation tools for continuous builds, you often find edge cases where your builds have minor variations due to the environments on which the projects have been built. To isolate these, it is often useful to have the build tool output a snapshot of it’s properties at the time the project was built. Thankfully, Ant and Maven make this easy to implement, required additions to your config files are below for each tool.

Maven: (pom.xml)

....
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.7</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<phase>install</phase>
<configuration>
<target>
<echoproperties />
</target>
</configuration>
<goals>
<goal>run</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

NOTE: ‘target’ is preferred over ‘tasks’ in newer versions of the plugin, it was deprecated in 1.5.

Ant: (build.xml)

...
<echoproperties />
...

REFERENCES: