Recording video of test execution via Protractor

Recently I came across a use case of recording the video of the test execution in my CI environment - where tests run in headless mode). 

My thought was - record video of the test execution in CI - save it if test failed, else discard it.

Below are some resources I came across for potentially implementing this - 

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/protractor-video-reporter/tutorial
• https://github.com/tepez/protractor-video-reporter/issues/5
• https://github.com/tepez/protractor-video-reporter

Unfortunately for me - due to some other infrastructure constraints - this got de-prioritized. But hopefully I will be getting back to this soon.

Any browsermob-proxy users facing issues with some requests not getting fired?

Is there anyone using browsermob-proxy who is having issues with some requests not getting fired?

I have integrated browsermob-proxy with my protractor tests. This works wonderfully when I run my tests from Mac (against local environment, or any other test environment).

However, when I run my tests from CI (agent is SUSE Enterprise 11.4) - my tests fail. 

I narrowed down the problem to the following scenario:

On some specific user action in the UI, there are a lot (>100) of requests fired from the browser in parallel (batches). There are a couple of scenarios like this in my application - and the test fails in all these cases.

Here is a screenshot of what the captured HAR file shows -

The same test works when I run this locally from Mac

Any idea how to fix this? Thank you in advance!

See this issue for more details - (https://github.com/lightbody/browsermob-proxy/issues/492)

Any WAAT (Web Analytics Automation Testing Framework) users out there?

It has been over 2 years since any update to WAAT - Java or Ruby. Over the years, I have realised, and also received a lot of thoughts / feedback from users of WAAT around where it helps, and what challenges exist. 

Also, given the widespread IoT & Big Data based work going on around the world, (Web) Analytics now plays a much bigger role in guiding business take better decisions. 

WAAT (again) fits in the grand scheme of things very nicely as a framework to automate the validation of correct reporting of tags to any Web Analytics solution provider.

Hence, its a no-brainer for me - it is high time I work on some of the feedback and limitations of WAAT to make it usable again!

At the recently concluded Selenium Conference 2016 held in Bangalore, India, I got an idea of how to overcome a lot of challenges (listed below) and pain in using WAAT. 

What's next?

To implement my new idea, this does mean a couple of things:

• Existing plugins have limited use - and needs to be deleted.
• A new plugin would need to be created - which may mean different set of APIs, and also different way to specify the test data.

Questions for you

Before I go ahead making these changes - I would like to get answers to the below questions (please add your answers directly in the comments):

• Is anyone currently using WAAT? If yes - 
• which version (Java / Ruby)?
• which plugin
• Using HTTP / HTTPS?
• Which Web Analytic solution are you using? (ex: Google Analytics, WebTrends, etc?)
• Would you be interested in using the new WAAT? If yes - 
• Which language? Java / Ruby / JavaScript / Python / etc?
• Would you like to contribute to implementing this new WAAT? If yes - contact me! :)

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Current plugins available in WAAT:

• Omniture Debugger (WAAT-Java)
• Pros:
• OS independent
• Run using regular-test-user 
• Cons:
• Browser dependent - need to implement ScriptRunner for the UI-driver in use
• Web-Analytic solution dependent - only for Adobe Marketing Clout / Omniture SiteCatalyst
• HTTPSniffer (WAAT-Java, WAAT-Ruby)
• Pros
• Web-Analytic solution independent
• Browser independent
• UI-Driver independent
• Cons
• 3rd party libraries are OS dependent
• HTTPs is not supported out-of-the-box
• Run tests as "root"
• JSSniffer (WAAT-Java, WAAT-Ruby)
• Pros
• Web-Analytic solution independent
• Browser independent
• HTTPs supported out-of-the-box
• No 3rd party library dependency
• Cons
• Need to write JavaScript to get the URL from the browser context
• UI-Driver dependent

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Protractor for Angular apps?

Already asked these questions in the vodQA group on LinkedIn - but thought to repeat the same here as well - in case someone else also reads this, and has some thoughts.

I am experimenting (again) with Protractor for automation against Angular-based web-apps. This time around, my comfortness with Javascript is better (by a couple more % than before) - so I am better prepped for this challenge. 

That said, I am interested in knowing a few things on this:

• Has anyone in the group worked with protractor recently? 

• What has been your experiences in working with it? 

• Who are the roles involved in the automation implementation, execution and maintenance? 

• What are the typical utilities you built in this framework?

• How have you been modelling you page-object pattern with JS / protractor based frameworks? Or, is there some other better set of patterns for JS that should be used?

• How did you build your page objects? How did you build and manage the composition / nesting of pages? Did the method of a page return an appropriate page object?

• How many tests exist in your framework? 

• Do you run your tests in parallel?

• Do your tests run in CI? If yes, which driver do you use? Protractor site discourages the use of phantomJS. 

• Would it be possible to share some (non-confidential) examples of how you built your Page Objects? How are your specs written? Any example of that possible to see?

• Did anyone manage to run their tests against Safari / IE11 as well?

• What about soft asserts? Did you implement this?

• I saw a strange issue when running my test against chrome - I got the element is not clickable at xxx coordinates. However the same test ran against Firefox and phantomjs. Anyone seen this before?

• Given that protractor site does not recommend using phantomJS driver much, anyone used xvfb for running their tests in CI?

• What reporters do you use?