24 by 7 UI Test Automation Challenges

We have automated most of the Business scenarios in our Product. Most of the times we have not faced any issues. However we have faced few challenges while running the same scenarios in 24 by 7.

Following are the challenges and Workarounds:

• Challenge: Observed Browser hang and not responding for the UI interactions. This might be due to continuous execution and load.
• Workaround: Setting Maximum Timeout for each test so that timeout exception will thrown to stop the browser automatically. Because of timeout, Next test will start running.

• Challenge: Java Script Timeout Error Popup because of load and continuous execution.
• Workaround: Setting Browser Configuration "dom.max_script_run_time" with maximum value.

• Challenge:Browser Profile Locking in case browsers have not closed properly due to different reasons
• Workaround: Cleaning up Browser Profiles using some batch script to delete the profiles periodically.

• Challenge:Capturing Screenshots will not work in remote machine in case of closing the remote machine directly. But Screenshot will more helpful while debugging tests. 
• Workaround:closing RDS directly will create this problem.close RDS with the below command to capture screenshot.
  tscon %sessionname% /dest:console

What 24x7 testing is all about?

In my previous post, I mentioned about 24x7 testing as one item in the agile testing world. Here, I would like to highlight some details about 24x7 testing and its advantages.

What is 24x7 Testing?

As the name tells, it is about running your automated test suite 24x7 in a continuous manner. We could take a subset of the regression suite, or entire regression suite for the same purpose. They test cases should run continuously in any one of your favourite environments all the time.

Why should we run tests 24x7?