UI Automation with Geb & Spock : Introduction — Part 1
Learn Geb + Spock : The best of breed solution for all your UI automation needs
If you are starting a new UI automation project for your web application, and have developer-grade test engineers on your team, look no further than Geb + Spock!
In this tutorial, we will share the code to a fully functional Geb + Spock example with all the best practices.
Let’s start with some high-level information first.
Say Hello to Geb
Geb is a Groovy-based browser automation solution which :
- helps you write robust, maintainable, and reusable browser automation code
- uses Selenium WebDriver under the hood
- provides highly expressive jQuery-like syntax for content selection
- is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) with useful out-of-the-box features and supporting patterns
- provides native support for Page Object Model
Sample Geb code that illustrates some of the above bullet points :
A sample Geb page object
Full code for the above Geb TwitterPage class snippet available on GitHub: TwitterPage
Meet Spock
Spock is a Behavioral Driven Design (BDD) testing and specification (spec) framework that improves quite a bit on the existing frameworks like JUnit and TestNG. Some of the useful features of Spock are :
- Clarity in the test structure in the form of an explicit arrange-act-assert structure. (Spock uses the given-when-then pattern.)
- Providing clear context around why a text failed so you quickly see the reason for the test failure
- BDD driven specs means tests are readable by business / non-techie people
- Great support for parametrized / data-driven tests
- In-built mocking and stubbing capabilities
A sample Spock test / spec
Full code for the above Spock spec available on GitHub: LoginLogoutSpec.groovy
Source Code For a Geb + Spock gradle project
Checkout a fully functional Geb + Spock gradle project from this Automation School github repo. The UI automation example in this repo illustrates several cool features of Geb & Spock :
- Source code: https://github.com/AutomationSchool/geb-and-spock-automation-examples
- How to run the sample code: The readme has instructions on how to run this example : https://github.com/AutomationSchool/geb-and-spock-automation-examples/blob/master/README.md
Upcoming articles in this Geb & Spock series
In the upcoming articles in this Geb & Spock series, we will dive into the details on the following topics :
- Config files: Geb.config file, Application config files, ConfigReader / ConfigSlurper
- Wait profile configuration: How to “wait” elegantly for various page or HTML element events using implicit waits or using waitFor()
- “At Checking”: A cool feature of Geb that makes it a breeze to wait for your next page in a elegant way
- Content DSL and reusing content with Geb Modules: In the sample repo code, we have a module called HeaderModule, that all pages use for common content
- BDD Spock Specs, Functional testing with Stepwise, Shared: Cookie management and sharing context between tests in functional tests
- Driver management using Marcin Erdmann’s webdriver-binaries-gradle-plugin: This plugin helps in just in time downloading/caching of the browser drivers
- Misc : Generating screenshots, page structure, class hierarchy
Good article. Looking forward to next ones