Selenium is a very popular browser automation tool, primarily used for testing purposes. It provides extensions to emulate user interaction with browsers, a distribution server for scaling browser allocation, and the infrastructure for implementations of the W3C WebDriver specification that lets you write interchangeable code for all major web browsers.
In this article, you can find an overview of Selenium, how to get started and how you can leverage it using your test automation framework to integrate your test results within TestRail using the TestRail CLI. This will allow you to centralize your automated test results and take advantage of all the analytical and reporting capabilities TestRail provides.
Getting started with Selenium
At the core of Selenium is WebDriver, an API and protocol that defines a language-neutral interface for controlling the behavior of web browsers. Since WebDriver is an API in its essence you can choose to use it with any programming language that provides bindings to it.
You can quickly get started with Selenium in three steps:
- Install browser drivers to enable Selenium to interact with the browsers you want to automate
- Install a Selenium library to use with your preferred programming language and test automation framework
- Write your Selenium script to perform any action against any website
After you have successfully run your first Selenium script, it's time to think about how you will structure your tests. Test automation frameworks help you do exactly that, by providing rules and an infrastructure for you to build your automated tests. These usually provide utilities to structure your tests (i.e.: how to setup or teardown your tests), assertion mechanisms, as well as reporting capabilities.
To import test results to TestRail, you can make use of two mechanisms:
- The TestRail CLI, which abstracts the logic behind managing the creation of test cases and test runs
- The TestRail API, which allows you to automate managing any test entity in TestRail using HTTP requests
Importing results to TestRail using the TestRail CLI
To import test cases and test results to TestRail, we recommend using the TestRail CLI. The TestRail CLI is a command line interface tool that allows you to effortlessly upload test automation results from any JUnit-style XML file to TestRail.
To use the TestRail CLI to import test results, you need to select a test automation framework that allows you to generate a JUnit report. You can see how the TestRail CLI resolves the elements in the report in the JUnit to TestRail mapping article.
When it comes to integrating your Selenium tests with TestRail using the TestRail CLI, it all comes down to the reporting capabilities of the test automation framework you are using. The JUnit XML format is very standard and supported by most of the modern test automation frameworks, although you may need to add some extra configurations to your framework to enable this kind of reporting. You can see our integration tutorials for some of the most popular frameworks to learn how to generate JUnit reports and import the results to TestRail below.
- Integrating with JUnit5
- Integrating with TestNG
- Integrating with Pytest
- Integrating with Robot Framework
- Integrating with NUnit