Selenium IDE Scheduler Has Arrived – Part 6

In part 5, you learnt more about how to add more jobs, edit jobs and delete them along with the Run Now feature and the Activity log. This is the final part of this series where I talk about some related stuff. If you have not seen my other parts, I would suggest that you start from part 1.

Getting Results

Once you start using the Selenium IDE Scheduler, you will realise that running test suites automatically is not very useful unless you have the results for each automated run. While there is no UI for it yet, I have you covered. If you install my File Logging plugin for Selenium IDE, you can set a file to write the log to. All the automated test suite runs will log to the file as well.

If you have installed my Test results plugin for Selenium IDE, the test results for each suite that the scheduler runs is saved automatically. There is no UI for this yet, but the results are stored under the Firefox profile folder in selenium-ide/job_results folder.

Finally, I am going to open source a test dashboard that I have been working on soon. The Selenium IDE Scheduler automatically sends the job results to the test dashboard server which give you an overall view of all your tests as well as allow you to view the test results and statistics for each test. I will write a post with details on how to get it as well as instructions on setting it up.

Firefox Memory Issues

I have included a scheduler plugin that periodically dumps memory while the scheduler is running. It can quickly take up a lot of space. The memory dump files are stored in the profile folder. You can delete them if when ever you want. I hope that these files are useful if you find Firefox dying on you while running your tests using the Scheduler. Currently, the only workaround I have is to restart Firefox once in a while.

Watch Dog

I have also included a watch dog plugin that tries to kill an unresponsive test so that other test can get an opportunity to continue. Since I have not come across many unresponsive tests, I have not been able to test this thoroughly. If you see a message in your log that is like Dead test detected, going to kill it, let me know.

Scheduler Plugins

The scheduler was designed to have plugins. A bunch of these have been bundled already. However, there is no public API yet. If there is interest, I will finish the public API and the isolation code and provide a couple of examples.

Final Thoughts on the Scheduler

About two years back, I started thinking about adding the scheduler feature to Selenium IDE. I could not justify the time and effort that would be needed to develop and test this feature. In the days of “build the right it before you build it right” (http://www.pretotyping.org/), I was not so sure until I met some enthusiastic users of Selenium IDE. I went through several design iterations to reach this point. I have to admit that it has been a lot of hard work but also a lot of fun as well. I feel that we have come to a point where the scheduler is mature enough to be used by most users. There is always more stuff to be done. I leave it to you to tell me if you find this feature useful and what would make your life easier as users of Selenium IDE.