Use a test task in a deployment project
Asked by Carolyn Van Slyck:

As part of the deployment to a test environment, I need to run some integration tests that my QA team has defined as critical for evaluating the success of a deployment. If the tests don't pass, then the deployment should be marked as failed.

While I could run nunit-console.exe in a script task and figure out how to publish the result file somewhere... I would prefer to use the same Nunit task that is available in a build plan and have the test results published with the deployment. Is that possible?


Answers:
author: VikasB
body: You can use Cucumber For Bamboo plugin. This plugin adds Cucumber parsers in Build as well ad Deployment plans. It provides options to pass or fail build if any test is failed or based on failure threshold or can just print test results in Log without affecting deployment status.  
The plugin also adds new UI elements to display deployment tests, Cucumbers results and pie chart of tests. It also has features to automatically link tests with JIRA issues.  
<https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.mdb.plugins.cucumberforbamboo/server/overview>


author: VikasB
body: Plan runners add on adds task to run integration tests build plan from deployment and pass or fail the deployment based on tests status  
<https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.mdb.plugins.planrunners/server/overview>  
Hope this helps.


author: Carolyn Van Slyck
body: Yeah that seems to be the only way. Hopefully a later version of Bamboo has it built in but for now a custom task will get us by.

Thanks!


author: Jason Monsorno
body: I completely agree, but the nunit runner doesn't implement DeploymentTaskRequirementSupport. You could recode the DotNet plugin to do so though.


author: Carolyn Van Slyck
body: I am running my unit tests in the build plan.

But, like you, my integration tests which I would like to run on a new deployment use NUnit. It doesn't really fit into how we would like to use deployments to have to kick off a seperate build plan just to test a deployment and then somehow train people to hunt down the status of that build plan to know the status of a deployment. The tests rightfully belong with the deployment and their results should be displayed on the deployment status page.


author: Jason Monsorno
body: Strictly speaking on unit tests, they should be atomic or near-atomic operations that don't talk to other services etc and should not rely on a specific environment except for maybe minimum spec requirements (processor, memory) but within your own setup that should already be established so that would be a bit backwards thinking to run after deployment. Smoke, performance, or end-to-end testing could definitely make sense to run against a site with a fresh deployment. We have about a 50/50 mix of that inside of nunit tests so nunit alone wouldn't cover everything in my case. I'm in process now of setting up additional plans to run them nightly; the reason I decided to step them out into their own plans was to utilize the Bamboo statistics and charting. With nightly/daily runs I can chart the "build time" of each plan per day which is perfect for our performance testing.


author: Carolyn Van Slyck
body: Am I going about this backwards? It seems like the first thing anyone would want to do after deploying to an environment is to run a few checks to make sure it was successful. What am I missing?