Generating the testing reports is a crucial step in the website testing process. Also, organizations are adopting automated Selenium testing to get better and more productive test results. So, generating and analyzing test reports is also essential to making a website or web app successful. That’s where reporting comes in.
Generating reports is defined as documenting the execution of your automated tests. When discussing website testing, the first tool that is very popular and recommended by tech experts is Selenium. Selenium is an open-source tool that is used to perform automated website testing. Selenium has many internal tools to generate detailed and informative reports.
In this article, you will see what is Selenium testing, what are testing reports, what are the benefits of generating testing reports and what tools can be used to generate advanced reporting techniques for Selenium test reports.
Introduction to Selenium Automation Testing
Many automation testing tools available in the market are suitable for web testing. However, the Selenium automation tool is a well-known testing tool that expert website developers and testing teams widely prefer. Selenium is an open-source automated testing tool that tests web applications across various browsers. Selenium was primarily developed in the JavaScript language. Selenium is supported across various platforms such as Windows, macOS, etc. So, the user does not need to worry about the platform they use for the testing process. Also, Selenium has multi-browser support, such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc. Selenium also provides a wide array of language support.
Selenium automation testing has a huge language support. The team can easily choose their preferred language, such as JavaScript, Python, PHP, etc, to write the test case and generate reports. Automating the tests to generate the test reports allows you to execute website testing with more efficiency and less time consumption. Many cloud-based AI-powered test orchestration and execution platforms like LambdaTest can be integrated with Selenium to make your testing even more productive.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform to run manual and automated tests at scale. The platform allows you to perform real-time and automation testing across 3000+ environments and real mobile devices.
It supports cross-browser testing across many browsers, ensuring that web applications are compatible and function seamlessly on different browser versions. This is critical for delivering a consistent user experience to a diverse user base.
LambdaTest extends its testing capabilities to real mobile devices, providing a realistic environment for testing mobile applications. This includes testing various devices, operating systems, and screen sizes and addressing the complexities of mobile app development.
Performing the cloud-based resources helps to save money and scale your testing according to your needs. It also helps to reduce the manual effort in the case of automated Selenium testing on the cloud. You do not need to worry about the maintenance and checkups, as the cloud provider manages these.
When you are performing automation testing with Selenium, it becomes very important to generate your testing reports. It provides advanced filters and screenshots of all the tests and displays them for each step. By using extent reports with Selenium, you can show evidence along with the status of test cases so that stakeholders can make informed decisions. So, let us briefly review some pointers on why making test reports and analyzing them is important.
Importance of Selenium Test Reports
Selenium does not support report generation for automation testing. But you can do this with the help of Selenium TestNG. The various reasons why test reports are critical in Selenium automation testing are as follows:
- Debugging
Debugging is identifying and resolving errors or bugs in a software system. It is an important aspect of software engineering because bugs can cause a software application to malfunction. So, with the help of test reports, you can quickly identify the errors and bugs, and it will improve the testing efficiency.
- Continuous Improvement
Test reports also help to automate the testing process with continuous improvement as they identify patterns of failure and areas of improvement and optimize test suites for better reliability and efficiency over time.
- Integration
Test reporting can be integrated with Continuous Integration (CI) tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, or TeamCity, enabling automatic generation and distribution of reports as part of the CI/CD pipeline. Doing this ensures timely feedback on your testing results and keeps all the members of your testing team up to date.
- Result Analysis
Test reporting is a very useful step as it provides insights into executing test cases across different browsers, operating systems, and devices in the Selenium Grid. You can use the test reports to analyze the process at each stage deeply, thus improving the overall testing result.
- Visibility
Getting a clear and well-organized test report will help you inform each stakeholder about the software application’s release readiness. It improves the overall health of the test suite, and the productivity and quality of your automation testing improves.
Advanced Reporting Techniques for Selenium Test Results
Now, let us see the various advanced reporting techniques for Selenium test results. Many advanced tools are available for reporting Selenium test reports, but here are the best advanced reporting tools for Selenium.
- TestNG Reporter Log
TestNG reporter log has a built-in reporting tool used as an advanced technique to make reporting easy and accurate in Selenium. This generates the testing reports in the form of HTML files. The HTML file contains several informative details, such as the number of test cases you executed and the time each test case takes to run. It also contains a detailed log of each passed and failed test case. It is very popular among Java developers and is a good automation reporting tool for Selenium.
You can also perform parallel execution of test cases to generate reports, i.e., running multiple test cases is only possible in the TestNG framework. There is no extra integration required to generate Selenium reports with TestNG. But TestNG also has a drawback in that it supports only Java Language.
- Extent Reports
Extent Report is an open-source test reporting library that generates advanced and informative reports for Selenium test reports. Extent reports display the Selenium testing reports in an HTML file, and the reports are depicted as a pie chart. A pie chart is a type of graph representing data in a circular form, with each slice of the circle representing a fraction or proportionate part of the whole. All pie slices add up to equal 100 percent and 360 degrees. It helps to make your reports visually comprehensive and easy to understand.
The Extent Reports with Selenium show all the test case statuses having separate information for running test cases, passed test cases, and failed test cases along with the evidence. It helps all the stakeholders keep an eye on the testing status and make important decisions. Extent reports support CI/CD integrations, have good community support, and have a well-documented structure for reporting. It also provides analytics and insights in a dashboard where the test progress can be tracked.
- JUnit Reporter Log
JUnit is a popular reporting built-in tool for Selenium tests. JUnitHTMLReporter within the JUnit Reporting tool provides detailed reports about the Selenium test results. JUnit is an open-source framework used as an advanced technique for generating Selenium test reports. It can execute and generate reports in less time, which makes it a popular choice for generating Selenium test reports.
This tool summarizes the test results and provides a detailed report for each package. A package is just like a package in Java and consists of a group of similar types of classes and sub-packages. JUnit requires some coding knowledge to make it properly functional. One of the drawbacks of using it is that it provides local reports only.
Calliope.pro
Calliope.pro is an independent and advanced tool for generating advanced Selenium test reports. You can use this tool to monitor the testing reports and logs continuously. It monitors and shares the test results with Agile and all the stakeholders so that you can be aware of the current status of your Selenium website testing. Calliope.pro accepts the JSON or XML reports generated from existing testing frameworks, which are used to generate a dashboard.
This dashboard contains detailed information about the testing results. It can be used with frameworks such as Cucumber, JUnit, and RestAssured. Calliope.pro can be used by any tester, developer, or product owner to get advanced and detailed information at a glance. This tool can also enable CI/CD pipeline integration, which helps schedule test execution and report generation.
Conclusion
Selenium is considered one of the most popular tools for website automation testing. In the Selenium test suite, you get a lot of useful built-in tools and utilities that help to make your Selenium testing process easy and efficient. Reporting is another important factor that should be considered in website testing. Reporting is defined as documenting the execution of your automated tests. It helps you understand what tests were run, which ones passed or failed, and why they might have failed.
To generate advanced and informative reports, some points should be considered. These points are understanding the requirement for generating reports, integrating with the CI/CD pipeline, etc. The tools that can be used to adopt advanced reporting techniques for Selenium testing reports are JUnit, TestNG, etc. JUnit is a built-in tool for Selenium tests, and it is used as an advanced technique for generating Selenium test reports. It can execute and create reports quickly, making it a popular choice for generating Selenium test reports.
