“Serenity, that feeling you know you can trust your tests.” Sounds great, but I was thinking of Firefly first when I heard the name ‘Serenity’. In this case, we are talking about a framework you can use to automate your tests.
The selling points of this framework are that it integrates your acceptance tests (BDD) with reporting and acts like living documentation. It can also integrate with JIRA and all that jazz. Hearing this, I wasn’t ‘wowed’ per se. There are many tools out there that can do that. But Serenity isn’t supporting just one approach. Although it is heavily favouring Webdriver/Selenium, you can also use JBehave, JUnit, Cucumber. That is really nice!
Last weekend, at the Board of Agile Testers, we tried the framework with a couple of people. Our goal was to see if it’s really easy to set up, to see if the reports are useful and how easy it is to implement features. We used Serenity ‘Cucumber-style’ with Selenium/Webdriver (Java) and the Page Object Pattern.
Setup
It maybe goes a little too far to say a totally non-technical person could set up the framework, but it was pretty easy. Using your favorite IDE, all you had to do was import a Maven archetype (we used a demo project) and all the Serenity dependencies are downloaded for you. We would recommend using Java 7 at least, Java 6 gave us problems.
Using the tool
The demo project tests ran alright, but we noticed it was quite slow! The reason is probably that Serenity takes a screenshot at every step of your test. You can configure this setting, thankfully.
At the end of each test run, Serenity generates an HTML report. This report looks really good! You get a general overview and can click on each test step to see the screenshots. There is also a link to the requirements and you can see the ‘coverage’ of your tests. I’m guessing they mean functional coverage here, since we’re writing acceptance tests.
Writing our own tests
After we got a little overview of the tool we started writing our own tests, using a Calculator as the System Under Test. The Serenity specific Page Object stuff comes with the Maven archetype so the IDE could help you implement the tests. We tried to do it in a little TDD cycle. Run the test, let it fail and let the output give you a hint on how to implement the step definitions. Beyond the step definition you had to use your Java skills to implement the actual tests.
Conclusion
The tool is pretty developer oriented, there’s no denying that. The IDE integration is very good in my opinion. With the Community IntelliJ edition you have all the plugins you need to speed up your workflow. The reporting is indeed the most beautiful I had seen, personally. Would we recommend changing your existing framework to Serenity? Unless your test reports are shit: no. There is in fact a small downside to using this framework; for now there are only about 15 people who actively contribute. You are of course allowed to join in, but it is a risk that there are only a small group of people actively improving it. If the support base grows, it will be a powerful framework for your automated tests and BDD cycle. For now, I’m going to play with the framework some more, because after using it for about 3 hours I think we only scratched the surface of its possibilities.
