The truth is that almost nobody writes test cases these days by hands. Okay, for big and serious, and requiring mind efforts things like scenarios, testers write. PowerShell frameworks are all about automation and demand as little manual work as possible. Like other GUI and Web testing tools, PowerShell frameworks generate test results by watching the code execution. Let’s go to the samples:

ipmo [path]\SePSX.dll
[SePSX.Preferences]::EveryCmdletAsTestResult = $true;
Start-SeFirefox | Enter-SeURL "http://google.com" | Get-SeWebElement -Name q | Set-SeWebElementKeys Cheese | Submit-SeWebElement;

What did we expect from this code? We set the EveryCmdletAsTestResult setting on, started an instance of Firefox, navigated to Google and submitted a query. As we saw no errors, we want to get our passed test results. How to do that?

[TMX.TestData]::CurrentTestScenario.TestResults | FL Name,Status

The output is as follows:
Name : Start-SeFirefox
Status : PASSED

Name : Enter-SeURL “http://google.com”
Status : PASSED

Name : Get-SeWebElement -Name q
Status : PASSED

Name : Set-SeWebElementKeys Cheese
Status : PASSED

Name : Submit-SeWebElement;
Status : PASSED

Name :
Status : NOT TESTED
Every cmdlet reported itself as Passed, and five results display this. The sixth result is a pre-generated test result that will be used in the immediately next cmdlet call.

This is too ideal, now we change our code to obtain real-life results. We are seeking for one of Google 2.0 controls, namely ‘q2’ (Marissa Mayer’s gone, hasn’t she?).

ipmo [path]\SePSX.dll
[SePSX.Preferences]::EveryCmdletAsTestResult = $true;
Start-SeFirefox | Enter-SeURL "http://google.com" | Get-SeWebElement -Name q2 | Set-SeWebElementKeys Cheese | Submit-SeWebElement;

The code failed (controls have not been renamed yet), where are our results?

[TMX.TestData]::CurrentTestScenario.TestResults | FL Name,Status

The output is below:
Name : Start-SeFirefox
Status : PASSED

Name : Enter-SeURL “http://google.com”
Status : PASSED

Name : Get-SeWebElement -Name q2
Status : FAILED

Name : Get-SeWebElement -Name q2
Status : FAILED

Name :
Status : NOT TESTED

The third and the fourth results have different exceptions in their Descriptions, though it’s a place where module’s code review needed…

Now, let’s see how time was consumed:

[TMX.TestData]::CurrentTestScenario.TestResults | FL Name,Status,TimeSpent

As can be seen, there is a default 500 milliseconds’ delay after starting the browser, 2 seconds were spent on navigation to the google page, and 5 seconds (the full time of [SePSX.Preferences]::Timeout) were spent on attempts to get the control of our interest.

In practice, testers are often interested in Failed results, much more often that in the list of Passed. 🙂 How to obtain such a list? First of all, we need to import the TMX module. Selenium and UIAutomation modules use TMX indirectly, as a library, but the advanced functionality is available as cmdlets:

ipmo [path]\TMX.dll;
Search-TMXTestResult -FilterFailed | FL Name,LineNumber,Code,Details

If the time of every test result is stored, what benefits do we have? Consider using the following query:

Search-TMXTestResult -OrderByTimeSpent -Descending -FilterFailed | FL Name,TimeSpent,Code

This lists Failed test results and time consumed in the descending mode (for what kind of user the contemporary versions of MS Excel have been written? Maybe, I’m wrong here? Okay, I’ll rewrite). This command lists Failed test results from bigger time spent to smaller.