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Explore Education Statistics Robot Framework tests

What is this?

This test framework runs UI tests against the Explore Education Statistics service using Selenium and Robot Framework.

Currently, these tests are being maintained so they can be run on Windows and Ubuntu

Pyenv installation

Pyenv is a tool for installing and managing multiple versions of Python on a single machine. It is the recommended way of installing and managing python.

See the installation guide for details on how to install pyenv for your operating system

What do I need to install?

Firstly, install Python 3.10. You can use pyenv to do this which is the recommended way of installing and managing python. See pyenv installation instructions

Then ensure python and pip are included in your PATH environment variable

  • python --version should return a version >= 3.10. If it doesn't you can try using the commands python3 or python3.10, if you have multiple versions of python installed on your machine.
  • To verify pip is installed, it is probably easiest to run entering python -m pip into a terminal. You should see the pip help text in response.
  • For Windows, I needed to add C:\Program Files\Python38 and C:\Program Files\Python38\Scripts to the PATH system variable. Check your Program Files directory to find out where Python is installed on your computer. A search engine will tell you how to add them to the PATH.

Then install pipenv:

pip install pipenv

NOTE: If the above command doesn't work (or any of the subsequent commands in this README) then you can prefix python -m to the command as below:

python -m pip install pipenv

From the project root run:

pipenv install

If you intend to run the tests from your local machine, you will also need to create .env files for the relevant environments:

  • .env.local
  • .env.dev
  • .env.test
  • .env.preprod
  • .env.prod

You can copy and rename the .env.example file in the robot-tests directory, replacing the variable values with those for that file's specific environment. The tests rely on these environment variables being set.

Variables you may want to set in a .env file are documented in .env.example.

Code style

In order to adhere to various linting & formatting rules, we use a few formatting and static-analysis tools to keep both Python & RobotFramework code clean. These are as follows:

How do I run the tests?

Prerequisites

The UI tests are mostly designed to set up their own data where possible, but some rely on pre-existing seed data and ALL rely on pre-existing users being present in the database.

For that reason, we must firstly ensure that we have appropriate data on our databases. Install the latest data dump file and seed data ZIP file.

  1. Download the latest ees-mssql-data-<version>.zip file and install it in your local databases.
  2. Download the latest seed-data-files-<version>.zip file and place in the tests/robot-tests/tests/files folder with the name seed-data-files.zip (i.e. without the -<version> part). It will be ignored from Git here, and will be automatically unpacked when running the tests to the tests/robot-tests/tests/files/.unzipped-seed-data-files folder.
    1. If the file is showing as an untracked file in Git, check the filename!

Run the tests

From the tests/robot-tests directory run:

pipenv run python run_tests.py

This script is responsible for running the UI tests. All available options for run_tests.py can be seen by running pipenv run python run_tests.py --help

Here is an example:

  • pipenv run python run_tests.py -f tests -e local -i robot --custom-env .env.keycloak

Running tests on the pipeline

After changing the tests and ensuring they pass locally, it is then recommended that you also run your changes against the Dev environment. This can be done by either running the tests locally against dev (run_tests.py -e dev) or by utilising the Azure DevOps Build pipeline "UI Tests".

You can run the "UI Tests" pipeline using the branch with your changes, and it will produce an artifact you can download with the test report, screenshots, etc.

If you wish to run tests against other environments, it's recommended to do so from your own machine. Intermittent failures that only happen on the pipeline are rare with non-dev environments, as only the general_public tests are run against them, so for now this has sufficed.

Tests are occasionally tagged to not run against a given environment (you may see tests tagged with NotAgainstDev, NotAgainstPreProd etc. if that is the case). This usually happens to test data differences throughout environments.

Authentication

To run the admin tests, the run_tests.py script uses scripts/get_auth_tokens.py. The get_identity_info function logs in as a user and then returns the relevant local storage for the authenticated user. This is done so that if an authenticated user is required, a test run only needs to log in once rather than once for each test suite.

After the user has been logged in by the run_tests.py script, the local storage data for the authenticated user is saved in the IDENTITY_LOCAL_STORAGE_{USER}.txt file. This is done so that if you're running the tests locally, you don't need to authenticate every time you rerun the tests, as the run_tests.py script will use the data they contain if they exist.

Webdriver

The run_tests.py script uses webdriver-manager to manage downloading the WebDriver binary.

webdriver-manager downloads the appropriate driver binary based on the browser you have installed, and the system OS/architecture, if not already present, into a global cache in the user home directory ~/.wdm.

You can force a specific version by using the script's --chromedriver <version> argument.

The latest version of chromedriver should always work for the pipeline. But if you need a specific version for the CI pipeline, you will need to add the --chromedriver argument to the run_tests.py call inside scripts/run_tests_pipeline.py. You can check this repository for the version of chrome used on the Azure agent you're using. At the time of writing, the robot tests use the Ubuntu 22.04 image.

Directory structure

This section details what the various directories in robot-tests contain.

scripts

This directory holds scripts used by run_tests.py and the CI pipeline.

test-results

This directory holds the output of a test run, including the test report and log. Screenshots are preserved across runs, but other files are overwritten.

tests

This holds the actual robot framework/selenium tests. The tests are themselves organised into different folders. The libs doesn't contain tests, but utility keywords used by the tests. Similar to libs, files contains files used by the tests.

Snapshots

To monitor changes to pages on Production, we use snapshots that are stored in robot-tests/tests/snapshots. These snapshots are created using the create_snapshots.py script in the robot-tests/scripts directory.

You can refresh the current snapshots by running:

cd robot-tests
pipenv run python scripts/create_snapshots.py

These snapshot files are used by the test suite tests/general_public/check_snapshots.robot. If the snapshot doesn't match the current page, the test case fails, and an alert is sent to Slack.

Guidelines for people writing UI tests

Parallelism / Pabot

It is essential that the test suites can run in parallel. This might not be the case if one test suite relies on test data that another changes. This might cause the tests, when run in parallel, to fail in unpredictable ways, making it difficult to determine what test data is the failure-making culprit.

For this reason, you MUST ensure that if a test suite changes test data, that you create test new data to be used specifically with that suite. Be careful if scavenging test data from other test suites! Ideally, every test suite will use test data that is only used by those particular tests.

A common error is for a test suite to intermittently fail when run with other test suites, as it was previous only run by itself. Your tests must pass even if other publications and releases exist within the same topic, when multiple test suites are run at once.

Test data:

After a group discussion, it was decided that tests will, as far as is possible, create their own test data. This means that any tests you write that alter data, you will need to create that data from scratch.

This however isn't the case for some tests. Certain tests rely on other tests scripts for bootstrapping a given environment with seed data. Test suites to create the seed data can be found in tests/seed_data and instructions on how to recreate the seed data can be found in the Seed Data README.

IDE

If searching for an IDE to add/edit these tests, consider using IntelliJ, Pycharm or VScode with the following extensions:

IntelliJ / Pycharm:

VScode:

Additional IntelliJ settings

This should give you autocompletion and allow you to click through to keywords defined in both .robot and .py files. For this to work in, you'll need to change the Project Structure to use "No SDK".

IntelliJ also allows you use to External Tools to right click on a file and run that file exclusively with these settings:

  • Program: /home/${USER}/.local/bin/pipenv OR C:\Python38\Scripts\pipenv.exe OR wherever pipenv is located -- use whereis pipenv on linux or where pipenv on windows
  • Arguments: run python run_tests.py --visual -i robot -f "$FilePath$" -e dev
  • Working directory: $ProjectFileDir$ (which should represent the robot-tests directory. You may have to do something like $ProjectFileDir$/../tests/robot-tests)

Visual testing - tables, charts and permalinks

We provide a suite of tests for visually checking tables, charts and permalinks and comparing before and after images. More information can be found in the Visual Testing README.

Troubleshooting

The tests are flaky when I run them locally.

Try running the frontend with pnpm build & pnpm start.

Test fails after not finding an element after x amount of seconds.

Try using the following command to run the tests:

You can also increase the length of waits via arguments to run_tests.py. You can see the options available by running pipenv run python run_tests.py --help.

To find the specific keyword that needs an increased wait, you can see what failed in the logs in test-results or utilise run_tests.py's --print-keywords argument.

You can also increase the length of waits via environment variables. See the variables listed in .env.example. Change the relevant .env.* file when running tests locally, or by changing Azure DevOps variables for the CI pipeline.

I get the following error when trying to run a UI test

    raise Exception(f"Timeout! Couldn't find element with xpath selector '{selector}'")
Exception: Timeout! Couldn't find element with xpath selector '//div[text()="Stay signed in?"]'

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "run_tests.py", line 253, in <module>
    setup_authentication()
  File "run_tests.py", line 234, in setup_authentication
    setup_auth_variables(
  File "C:\Users\Hive\explore-education-statistics\tests\robot-tests\tests\libs\setup_auth_variables.py", line 59, in setup_auth_variables
    os.environ[local_storage_name] = get_identity_info(
  File "C:\Users\Hive\explore-education-statistics\tests\robot-tests\scripts\get_auth_tokens.py", line 74, in get_identity_info
    raise AssertionError('Error when entering/submitting password')
AssertionError: Error when entering/submitting password

This error typically occurs when the BAU user password has expired and setup_auth_variables fails to login as the BAU user. You will need to update the password for the following users (as they usually expire around the same time).

  • BAU
  • Analyst
  • Pre-release

running-snapshot-tests

Refer to the create_snapshots.py script for more information (located in robot-tests/scripts).

Library-bugs

There are currently some bugs with the libraries we use for testing. This mainly pertains to running the tests on Mac. This bug basically means that the tests will fail when trying to operate the keyboard. See the open issue raised here

Who should I talk to?

Mark Youngman Duncan Watson Nusrath Mohammed