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cforeman's avatar
cforeman
New Contributor
8 months ago

Overriding mouse cursor focus running Cucumber tests for a desktop application

Hi - I would be very grateful for some help, advice or even random ideas!

We have a very large desktop application which runs overnight cucumber test suites (well over 1000 scenarios with multiple support lines which really do take all night!) on dedicated build agents/servers.  

For development work we all had our own Windows VMs which meant that we could kick off cuke tests we were writing/developing and continue multi-tasking on our laptops/linux VMs whilst the UI test did all it had to do - selecting/adding values, clicking buttons and checking outputs etc.

In a couple of months that is all going to change and we will no longer have dedicated Windows VM for development which means we will have to run any tests (new or changed) locally on our laptops and therefore any attempt at trying to write an email, respond to a Teams message etc. will cause the cuke test to fail and so productivity will become very poor whilst we just watch our screens without moving our mouse.

As this is a desktop application we can not set the ChromeDriver settings to be headless.  We have separate performance testing so are not worried too much about timings - we just need a solution ...

Has anyone else overcome this problem or does anyone know if there is a way to possibly have :

  • 2 mouse inputs, one dedicated just to carry out the cuke test instructions and then main one to carry on working
  • somehow running the cuke test in some kind of isolated environment but on the same machine - we use docker for db containers etc. but that won't work for localised development

Any thoughts would be much appreciated. 

Cucumber-JVM
  • cforeman's avatar
    cforeman
    New Contributor
    8 months ago

    I realise that this is a difficult problem to solve, but I can't believe no one has had a similar issue for long running cucumber feature files.

    Maybe someone could point me to a SmartBear help support group that could assist ?  Please - any help would be so appreciated !

    We are currently trying WSL for just the cucumber project running in its own container - or even using MobaXterm settings to run the cucumber test in another windows container, which we are closer to getting working than the former!

    We don't want to ditch using cucumber framework but at the moment when we move to AWS it is a blocker where we would have to change testing frameworks, so any help is really appreciated.