Geb + Spock : Best of breed UI Automation

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 :

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

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

Additional Resources / References :

• Geb User Guide
• Spock Framework Reference Documentation
• Spock testing framework versus JUnit
• Marcin Erdmann’s webdriver-binaries-gradle-plugin: https://github.com/erdi/webdriver-binaries-gradle-plugin
• Source code on GitHub : AutomationSchool/geb-and-spock-automation-examples