September 5th, 2018 by Adam Sandman
quality assurance devops integration
Someone on Quora asked the question - "Which test management tools provide integration with Selenium & CI tools?". When I read this question, it was interesting, as we do get this question quite a lot, and the answer does depend a lot on which flavor of Selenium your are talking about, and which CI tools in particular you want to use.
Which Flavor of Selenium Are You Using?
If you go to the Selenium web site, you will see that there are two main flavors of Selenium:
Selenium IDE
Selenium IDE is the original Selenium project. It is a simple Firefox browser plugin that lets you prototype automated browser tests using a simple three column layout.
Due to some breaking changes in Firefox, this plugin was not available for a while, but a team is maintaining it again (which is great news).
Selenium WebDriver (and Grid)
WebDriver is a different beast. It is a protocol used to automate a web browser from a programming language. Basically it provides a standardized way of sending commands to different web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE, Edge, Opera) from a variety of programming languages. With standard WebDriver the browser is a single instance, with Selenium Grid, you can execute the tests on a load balanced set of browser environments.
By itself though, WebDriver is just an API, it doesn't provide any tools for writing, debugging or reporting on the automated tests. Unlike Selenium IDE, you have to put together your own TestOps environment. Also you need to know which language and unit test framework you'll be using to write your WebDriver tests:
- .NET - NUnit, MS-Test
- Java - jUnit, TestNG
- Python - PyUnit, PyTest
- Ruby - Unit::Test
- NodeJS - Mocha, UnitJS
- etc.
So that's what Selenium can refer to. Now onto CI tools
Which Continuous Integration (CI) Tools Are You Using?
A quick Google search reveals that Continuous Integration typically means:
Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of automating the build and testing of code every time a team member commits changes to version control. CI encourages developers to share their code and unit tests by merging their changes into a shared version control repository after every small task completion. [cite: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/learn/what-is-continuous-integration]
However in reality, CI is usually referring to a component in the larger DevOps toolchain. So make sure that the CI tools and test management tools you're looking for fit into the overarching DevOps plan for your team.
Why Choose SpiraTest for Your Test Management?
So, now that you know which flavors of Selenium you are using, what languages you need to integrate with, and which CI and other DevOps tools to use, you can choose the test management tool that best fits that architecture. Well, not to blow our own trumpet too loudly, SpiraTest does have integration with Selenium IDE:
as well as integration with Selenium WebDriver and most of the common languages and unit test frameworks that testers use:
And of course, SpiraTest integrates with a wide variety of CI tools, including the most popular - Jenkins:
SpiraTest itself, is the most powerful and versatile test management system on the market today. It includes an integrated requirements management, test management, and defect tracking system with powerful, customizable reporting:
So I think it's safe to say that SpiraTest would be a good example of a test management tool that integrates with Selenium and CI tools.