Monthly Archives: November 2015

What to do when SpecRun doesn’t find any testcases to execute

So you’ve installed SpecRun, updated app.config, started a testrun….but SpecRun reports that it found 0 testcases. There’s two fixes for this.

Regenerate the feature files


Usually the *.feature.cs code-behinds aren’t removed when you clean the project. Those files still contain code pertaining to the previous test runner. You need to regenerate the .feature files in the solution before the code-behinds are updated to use the SpecRun test runner.

Clean Visual Studio’s cache for the test runners


Another cause for this unexpected behavior is due due to corruption in Visual Studio’s cache for the test runners. This can be fixed by the following:

  1. Close Visual Studio
  2. navigate to %TEMP%\VisualStudioTestExplorerExtensions\
  3. Delete any SpecRun related folders

How to get video recordings of your testcase

Recording the screen during test execution is very helpful in diagnosing issues. Here are a few ways you can achieve this.

Visual Studio’s Data Diagnostic Adapters

If you’re running your tests with Visual Studio and/or Test Controller/Agents, then you can add a .testsettings file to the test project and configure it to include the “Video Data Diagnostic Adapter” That will record the screen while each testcase is executing and save the results in the output directory specified in the .testsettings file. I find this to be very useful when I’m authoring new testcases on my machine or when I’m running through a Controller/Agent for an app that interacts with the desktop.

Selenium Grid Servlets

If you’re running on a Selenium Grid setup, then there are various ways of getting the nodes to record the screen. Take a look at Tuenti VideoRecorderService or Selenium Video Node.

Screen recording software

You can use some kind of screen recording software like Camstudio or VNC. For me this isn’t preferred as it requires manual action on behalf of the tester.