Ranorex Forum

How can I integrate the Ranorex GUI automation with the automatic build process in our shop?

We have a build server, which does nightly build process. We would like to include the GUI automation to be part of the build. The challenge is that all build process are back-end through a service, but Ranorex GUI automation needs a screen/desktop to run while we have to keep build server locked for most of the time.

The currently work around for us is to check machine every morning to make sure build is good, then manually kick off the GUI automation. Any better way to work around here?

Appreciate any thoughts.

Thanks,

We use Ranorex in our Continuous Integration environment ourselves to test the Ranorex Tools applications (sometimes a little chicken-egg problem *g*).
We have a distinct virtual machine with an always locked-on user (see following forum thread how to set up Ranorex in Continuous Integration: http://www.ranorex.com/forum/how-to-int ... -t529.html) to run all the user interface testing. When the nightly build is finished, the virtual machine is notified to start the UI testing and reports back when the UI tests are finished.

The advantage of using virtual machines for your UI testing is that you can have several ones running different operating systems.
Another advantage is that you don't change the build server operating system by installing your software every day to do the UI testing. Here at Ranorex, for example, we install the nightly Ranorex setup on the testing machine, perform the UI tests, and uninstall Ranorex again. If you do that directly on the build server, the operating system will soon get really dirty (MS installers tend to leave things behind, especially in the Windows registry).

Regards,
Alex
Ranorex Support Team

As an addendum to what Alex has said, look into the SysInternals tool called PSExec. With PSExec installed on your build box you can add a step at the late stages of your build to call PSExec and tell it to connect to your test machine and start your tests.

What I have set up for our build structure is the following:
1) Run the nightly automated build
2) Tell PSExec to connect to my VMWare server and reset a test image to base (base = everything installed for a clean OS which included Ranorex DLLs).
3) Wait for the VMWare server to tell me that the test image has booted and is ready
4) From the build server have PSExec then connect to the test image and tell it to launch my AUT installation & smoke test script.
5) Wait until the automated smoke test script installs and smoke tests the AUT then send out the happiness email to the team or the unhappy email to me and the QA team to research the issue.

It all works quite well actually.

Thank you both