Automated Testing: CruiseControl.NET, MbUnit, and WATiN

I have been using WATiR off and on, mostly off, to do automated web application testing since I first heard about it on Hanselminutes about two years ago.  Really, I just wanted an excuse to learn Ruby and to dip my feet into the Continuous Integration stream.

Well, that stream has become a river, and the next version--or should I say current version--of Team Foundation Server will have (has) baked in support for Continuous Integration, for real this time.

Those of us who do not have such fancy-dancy tools may be wondering what is left for us.  WATiR is great, but its a tough sell to a lot of rank-and-file developers, since you have to learn a new language.  Not only that, the most common CI tool for .NET solutions, CruiseControl.NET, doesn't play very nicely with WATiR output.  To make it work nicely, you end up with a software stack that reads like an equipment list in an adventure game: WATiR, CI Reporter, Nant, Test::Unit, Rspec, Rake, gaaaaaah!  Run away!

Seriously, this is bad news.  I just want one tool to write tests in that can output to a format that will show up in CruiseControl.NET's web dashboard.  Is that too much to ask?  Well, apparently, yes, it is.  However, it can be a lot simpler, and we won't have to learn a new language.

Enter WATiN: this is the WATiR inspired, .NET-based, IE automation tool we will use.  Of course, we still still need to write our tests, so we'll use MbUnit because it easily integrates with Cruise and complies with the WATiN STA requirement very easily.  There's a pretty good guide on how to integrate Simian, and MbUnit works pretty much the same way.

Now, you'll just need to configure a test runner.  Since we are using MbUnit, we'll just use MbUnit.Cons.exe and output to Xml.  Once you have that command-line ready, just configure your project in Cruise to execute it after your build task.

Best of all, we can use WatiN Test Recorder to record our tests for us.