It can be very useful to have TextTest run lots of longer tests (say) overnight and provide the results in an email, an HTML report or on your continuous integration server rather than have one of the interactive user interfaces present. That is the purpose of “batch mode”. To select batch mode, provide the command line option “-b <batch_session>” or fill in the “Run Batch Mode Session” tab under “How to Run” in the static GUI. In general, you will probably want to start such batch runs via a script, for example using crontab on UNIX. TextTest can also produce results in a format compatible with JUnit, which means popular CI servers (for example Hudson) can display them in the same way as unit test results.

The batch mode “session” is simply an identifier that defines a particular sort of batch run. Most of the batch mode configuration can be defined per session. Any identifier at all can be provided, and if no configuration is recognised for that session name default settings will be used. All of the batch mode config file settings that start with “batch_” (described below) are “composite dictionary entries” with the batch session names as keys, it is recommended to read the file format documentation for what this means.

None of the reports described are enabled by default, so it's possible to just use batch mode runs and monitor their console output. This is particularly useful in continuous testing environments such as ZenTest. However, with everything being black and white it can be hard to notice when tests succeed and fail. You can therefore provide the "-zen" option on the command line which will produce green and red console output when appropriate. This works on both POSIX and Windows, albeit in totally different ways internally.

If you set "batch_recipients" to a valid email address, TextTest batch mode generates an email report. For a multiple-developer project it is often useful to direct such reports to a newsgroup, providing everyone the chance to see at a glance what works and what doesn't. This will then generally look something like this (example newsgroup viewed in mozilla):

As you see from this example, the title of the mail consists of the date and a summary of what tests were run and what happened to them (for the application “Tail”, in this case). Note that the date provided may not be quite what you expect as it changes at 8am local time, so runs before this time will be assigned the previous day's date. This is because the functionality is often used for "nightjobs" which may start either side of midnight, which would cause confusion if the date used was the actual local date.

If the -name option is provided to the run on the command line, that name is used to define the run instead of the date. In general, use -name to test actual named releases, and the default date-functionality with nightjobs. (Note that "-name" also affects runs done via the GUI, see here for information about this.)

The body of the mail contains two further sections, one which summarises exactly which tests failed and a further section which endeavours to give some details as to why they failed. These sections can be explored or ignored depending on how involved the reader is in the project. Managers will generally only need to look at the subject lines...

The name of the application, as provided here, can be configured via the config file entry “full_name”. By default a capitalised version of the file extension used for the application will be used here, but this doesn't always look so nice in reports.

The “details” section consists of the textual previews as generated by the dynamic GUI's “text info” tab when a test fails. It can be configured in the same way. In addition, it can be useful to configure the maximum width of lines allowed: some newsgroups have maximum line length limits and you don't want test reports bouncing. This can be done via the config file entry “max_width_text_difference”.

You can also configured it so that mail is only sent if at least one test fails, set the config file entry “batch_mail_on_failure_only” to "true". By default mail will always be sent irrespective of what happens.

Where the mail is sent to is controlled by the config file entry “batch_recipients”. This can be configured per batch session, and may be a comma-separated list for multiple recipients. The sender address can be controlled by the “batch_sender” config file entry

The SMTP server to use for sending mail can also be configured via “smtp_server”. By default it will assume that no authentication is required, unless the "smtp_server_username" setting is defined. If so, it will attempt to login with that username and the password defined by "smtp_server_password" before attempting to send mail.

All of these will need to be configured on Windows as no defaults are provided. On UNIX, the SMTP server defaults to “localhost” and the sender address defaults to “$USER@localhost”, so it is generally only necessary to configure the recipients.

Many teams use a CI server and keep up-to-date information about test status available to all developers at all times. In order to integrate texttest with these systems, there is an option “batch_junit_format” which allows you to generate texttest results in the same format that JUnit uses. Most CI servers will understand this format, and this makes it easy to plug TextTest into existing build systems. The drawback of the JUnit format results is that some information is lost compared with the other formats. You will likely want to have the email as well. The CI server will give a basic indication that something is wrong, which you then investigate by looking at the email and/or reconnecting to the failed tests.

If you set “batch_junit_format” in your config file, then texttest will produce a folder "junitformat" in the run directory (under TEXTTEST_SANDBOX), and under there a subfolder for each application's test results. Each folder contains one xml file per test. Ant has a task "junitreport" that can collect all the xml files for one application together and produce a composite xml file and html report. There is an additional option “batch_junit_folder” which allows you to specify a different folder, (instead of "junitformat"), where the xml files should be written.

Note: if you are using TextTest with Java, you may want to look at for more tips.

For more flexibility in viewing and analysing a lot of results, as well as being able to easily monitor the behaviour of particular tests over time, it can be very useful to store the batch results in a repository and generate HTML reports from them. In order to store the information from the batch runs, the config file entry “batch_result_repository” should be set to a directory under which batch results can be stored. Results are then stored per test and day and are never overwritten: to recreate results for a particular day it is necessary to explicitly remove the previous ones, either manually or via the archiving script described below.

For the location of the actual reports, set the config file entry “historical_report_location” to another directory. Both of these are composite dictionaries as described above so both can be varied per batch session. In order to actually generate the report, run with the -coll flag (see below) which will rebuild all the reports from scratch based on what is in the repository.

The easiest way to get a handle on what this looks like is to look at this small example. Each day's results correspond to a column, while each test has a row. The results can be explored by clicking around. Note the new (in 3.22) toolbar at the top, which allows you to hide or show tests. The text box allows you to show only tests containing a certain string or regular expression. The coloured toggle buttons allow you to hide tests in a particular category: this uses the most recent result for each test. You can also hold down control and click them to show only that category.

For a real such page in active use, check out the nightly runs of TextTest's self tests page, which is updated every day with the latest status.

By default, each application will be shown on a separate page named after that application. An index page ("dashboard") will be created at the top level which will link to all the application pages and briefly indicate how many tests are succeeding and how many are failing. This index page is automatically generated when running with the "-coll" flag, but can also be regenerated alone : using -s batch.GenerateSummaryPage -b <batch_session>. The form of the page is determined by the file "summary_template.html" which will be copied to your repository the first time you build the pages. This can then be edited to e.g. add other relevant information and links to your dashboard page.

If you install "Matplotlib" (version 0.98 or later), a clickable graph that shows a summary of the test behaviour over time will be added at the top of the page. These graphs can also be generated alone by using -s batch.GenerateGraphs -b <batch_session>. Graphs generated in this way will currently include all runs which exist in the HTML pages. You can also then set "historical_report_piechart_summary" to "true" which will cause the little result summary tables to be replaced by Matplotlib pie charts if you think that looks nicer.

Sometimes though it can be useful to have several applications directly on the same page, especially if they don't have so many tests each. In this case you can set the config file entry "historical_report_page_name": the name given will be used as the title of the HTML report and all applications with the same value will appear on the same page. In this case no index/dashboard page will be generated.

The colours in the site are also configurable: use the config file dictionary setting “historical_report_colours”. To see how to set this, look at the config file table and pattern match on the default value. Note that you can now configure the run header colours per day of the week if you wish to highlight runs made, for example, at the weekend when more tests may be run.

If you're making use of TextTest's performance and memory testing features it can be useful to have this information displayed in a similar table. These are two ways to generate them. As a one-off, you can run TextTest with arguments like e.g. -coll web.performance or -coll web.memory instead of just -coll web. To generate them regularly it is usually more convenient to set the config setting "historical_report_resource_pages". For example:

[historical_report_resource_pages]
nightjob:performance
nightjob:memory

would cause the performance and memory pages to be generated also every time TextTest was run with the ordinary "-coll" argument (with "-b nightjob" in this case, of course). These reports will then appear in a subdirectory of the location of the ordinary report named "performance" or "memory" respectively.

The main difference with the standard report is that the colours correspond only to when the relevant resource has changed significantly, and "N/A" will be shown for tests which did not measure that resource. The text in the cells will be the measured memory or performance (rather than the difference).

By default each resource will end up in a separate such report. It is possible however to get several different resources end up in the same report, by using the setting "historical_report_resource_page_tables". For example:

[historical_report_resource_pages]
nightjob:performance_and_memory

[historical_report_resource_page_tables]
performance_and_memory:performance
performance_and_memory:memory

would cause both performance and memory tables to appear in a single report called "performance_and_memory".

Up to TextTest 3.12 there were two "subpages" produced as part of the HTML report: one showing the last six runs and one showing all of the runs. This is now completely configurable. The names of the subpages produced are controlled by the config file setting "historical_report_subpages", which by default will contain only "Last Six Runs" which works as before. It is however easy to remove this page via the {CLEAR LIST} mechanism.

Such a subpage will contain a subselection of the runs present in the repository. If no subselections are specified, all the runs will be included. So restoring 3.12's "All" page is just a matter of adding:

historical_report_subpages:All

There are two ways of subselecting the tests. You can specify a cutoff point, similar to "Last Six Runs", by specifying the dictionary entry "historical_report_subpage_cutoff". This should be keyed on the name of the subpage specified as above, and the value is the number of runs to include. You can also filter on days of the week, by providing a list of weekdays to include in the entry "historical_report_subpage_weekdays", which is also keyed on the name of the subpage. So for example, if we wanted to include a page with the last fortnight's results and a page only showing runs done at the weekends, we could do:

historical_report_subpages:Last Fortnight
historical_report_subpages:Weekend

[historical_report_subpage_cutoff]
Last Fortnight:14

[historical_report_subpage_weekdays]
Weekend:saturday
Weekend:sunday

After a while, very old test results in the repository cease to be interesting and can safely be archived. This is done via the script batch.ArchiveRepository, with arguments 'after' and 'before' for the time period to archive (The batch session to do it on is provided in the normal way via -b on the command line, it defaults to all known sessions if none is provided). The dates should be in the same format as the dates on the pages, e.g. 21Jan2005. This should be less critical now if you aren't generating an "All" page, which otherwise can take an extremely long time to generate with a year's data in it, but even so just searching for the files can take a while if there are a lot of them. It doesn't actually delete things but moves them to an <app>_history subdirectory of the location specified by "batch_result_repository", where they will not be picked up by report generation script and may be restored if desired.

The config file entry “batch_timelimit”, if present, will run only tests which are expected to take up to that amount of time (in minutes). This is of course only useful if performance testing is enabled for CPU time.

More generically, you can use the “batch_filter_file” entry to identify filter files to be associated with a particular batch run. These can either contain a list of tests or search criteria to apply and can be edited using the static GUI. In this context it can be useful to note that such filter files can contain application and version-specific suffices in case similar criteria imply different tests for different applications: this allows the same entry for batch_filter_file to indicate different tests for different applications and versions.

If certain versions should be run automatically as part of a batch mode run without needing to explicitly specify them on the command line, the entry “batch_extra_version” can be used for this purpose. This is a more specialised version of the “extra_version” setting.

If you wish to select the tests that will be run by a batch run without actually running it, e.g. to load them into the GUI or to run them not in batch mode, you can use the command line option "-bx <batch session name>" to achieve this. This has the effect of looking up and applying the settings configured for "batch_timelimit", "batch_extra_version" and "batch_filter_file".

If the entry “batch_use_version_filtering” is set to “true”, all versions are assumed to be disabled unless explicitly enabled by being included in the “batch_version” list setting. The point of this is in the presence of multiple test applications and multiple releases of the system: a single run of TextTest can be started with a particular version identifier and each application can decide in its config file if it wants to run tests for that version of the system. This is generally easier than trying to set up separate nightjob runs for each application.

Both of these things act in concert with any test selection filters selected on the command line or from the static GUI. As described there, only tests which satisfy all filters present will be selected.

When many versions of the system under test are active, and many different hardware platforms are used, you may want to test the system on all of these combinations. This can lead to a great many test runs and consequently a lot of emails. It is often easier to read these if they are collected into a single larger email: otherwise it is hard to get an overview of what is happening.

To do this, set the config entry “batch_use_collection” to "true" for the batch session in question. This will ignore the email-sending settings and send the batch report to an intermediate file. When all tests have been run in this way, run the collection script by providing the "-coll" argument on the command line. This will also build the HTML report described above, if that is enabled. To build only the email report or only the HTML report, you can also run with "-coll mail" or "-coll web" respectively. (The older plugin script "batch.CollectFiles" will still work but is now deprecated)

TextTest will then search for all such intermediate files and amalgamate them into a single mail per application. If a version is provided to this script via -v <version>, only runs which ran with that version identifier will be collected. This applies to the HTML report as well.

By default this collection procedure will find all batch runs that have currently stored their results under the root temporary directory. There are two ways in which this can be configured to handle errors in the processes that are supposed to create these runs.

For a start, you can set the config entry "batch_collect_max_age_days" which will ensure that no batch run older than the given number of days will be picked up and reported. This is useful in case the expected batch run has not been run for some reason, otherwise the results of the previous run may be picked up and lead to confusion.

Also, you can tell it what it should expect to find. By providing the entry "batch_collect_compulsory_version" (which is a list), you can tell it to report an error if a batch run for a certain version was not found, thus making it clearer if something has not run when it was supposed to. Both these settings are keyed on batch session names as described above.

This config file configures TextTest so that:

Batch mode's email report is all very well, but alone it doesn't give you the power of the GUI to view results in detail or to save them if that would be appropriate. It can be very useful to “reconnect” the GUI as if a batch run had been run using it. To do this, select “Reconnect” from the Actions menu in the Static GUI, which will bring up a dialog where you can browse your file system to find the files for the run (or provide the “-reconnect <directory>” option on the command line to the dynamic GUI or console interface).

There are essentially two ways to select previous runs. Either you explicitly select the run directory (it will be called something like "hello.version.13Aug171624.9856"), or you leave the parent directory selected and provide a version filter in the “Version to Reconnect to” field. This last possibility will then load in all runs that were run with that version identifier, or some more specific version identifier: i.e. if you provide "foo" it will load runs for "foo.bar" and "foo.blah" also if they exist. Not selecting either will load in every previous run that has left files in the relevant temporary space.

There is a switch at the bottom which allows you to choose between a quick re-display of what was displayed in the original batch email report, and an option to recalculate the results from the raw files. If for any reason the quick re-display isn't possible, it may trigger a recomputation anyway.

The recomputation, whether explicitly requested (-reconnfull on the command line has the same effect) or auto-triggered, will take the raw output of the run reconnected to and reapply the text filtering mechanisms to it, and also re-evaluate any automatic failure interpretation that could be triggered. This is useful if you have updated your config file filters in the meantime and want to see if they are applied correctly. It is, of course, a good deal slower than simply re-reporting what was present before, as occurs by default.

It is always hard to tell whether a test is just about to finish or whether there is a neverending loop in the code preventing it from doing so. In order to fix such cases one may specify a “kill_timeout” (in seconds) in the configuration file, in order to kill such test instances after a specified time. Please note that it is wall clock time not CPU usage which is measured here.

One further use case for this option are programs which pop up some “send bug report” window on crashing (this is often the case with executables on Windows) and do not exit until the window has been clicked away. With a “kill_timeout” at least the tests can continue although you still may have to click away the window manually. This option applies to the interactive modes as well but in batch mode it is most useful.

Unfortunately there is no easy and generic way to kill a process tree (that is a process and all processes started by it) which works reliably with all Windows versions. The default implementation in texttest is a call to a Windows system tool called "taskkill" which allows to kill a complete tree. This tool is available at least on WinXP and successors. The fallback (in case a call to taskkill fails) is a system function which kills the process but no descendants. Since there may be different tools on other versions of the OS or taskkill may need different options, the “kill_command” can be used to specify the exact call : TextTest will append the process ID to what is provided. Thus to make the tree kill on Windows XP less aggressive, try something like “kill_command:taskkill /T /PID”, which leaves out the /F meaning "force" from the default call but still has the /T for tree killing. The option “kill_command” does nothing on POSIX-based operating systems.