Tutorial: functional testing with JMeter - part 3

This article makes part of a series of articles. The other parts can be reached through following article links:

• Introduction
• part 1 - Using JMeter components
  
• part 2 - Recording http requests
  

Running the Test

Once the assertions are properly completed, we are expecting that running our Test Plan would pass all the assertions. Passed assertions will not show any error in Assertion Results | Listener installed within the same scope. As for all Listeners, results as captured by the Listeners can be saved and reproduced at a later time. Following is a sample explaining what passed Assertions would reveal as the Test is executed.


On the other hand, a failed Assertion would show an error message in the same Listener as the following snapshot illustrates.


Since a page error or Page not found error is a real risk in web applications, a failure may originate from such an error, and not just because of a failed Assertion. We can view more information about the sampler that contains the failed Assertion to investigate the origins of a failure. A View Results Tree Listener records the details of requests and logs all errors (indicated by the red warning sign and red fonts).The following figure shows that the page was available and page request was successful, however, the assertion failed.


Summary

This article helps you to understand the capabilities of JMeter tools that support functional testing, as we directly wrote and implemented a JMeter script. We have demonstrated building a Test Plan to contain functional validations (or assertions) by incorporating various essential JMeter components, particularly the 'Response Assertion' element and 'Assertion Result' Listener. By using the 'User Defined Variable' Configuration element, we have also parameterized several values in order to give our Test Plan better flexibility. In addition, we have observed the result of these assertions as we performed a 'live' run of the application under test. An HTTP Request sampler may require to be modified, if there are any changes to the parameter(s) that the sampler sends with each request. Once created, a JMeter Test Plan that contains assertions can then be used and modified in subsequent Regression tests for the application.