automated-tests - Coded UI Automated Test Case through Octopus Tentacle

Question

I am trying to run my Automated test cases deployed on a virtual machine and trying to trigger it with the help of Octopus Deployment tool. I installed test agent and Octopus Tentacle on my machine. Octopus is triggering the DLL's for Automated test cases very well.But while Octopus trying to run the test cases it's giving me an Error as below:-

Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Extension.UITestException: To run tests that interact with the desktop, you must set up the test agent to run as an interactive process. For more information, see "How to: Set Up Your Test Agent to Run Tests That Interact with the Desktop" (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=255012)
Error    01:59:38
If you are running the tests as part of your team build, you must also set up the build agent to run as an interactive process. For more information, see "How to: Configure and Run Scheduled Tests After Building Your Application" (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=254735)

I setup my password in test agent and set it as intractive process but still i am facing the same issue.

I am triggering my DLL's as below through Octopus.

 & "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TestWindow\vstest.console.exe" "C:\MyWebaPP\Automated_test\Automated_test.dll"

I tried each and every way i found.Please help me out in this.

Thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

We recently encountered the same problem.

During our research, we found this post on the Octopus support forum: http://help.octopusdeploy.com/discussions/questions/5080-tentacle-running-interactive-tests We also contacted Octopus Deploy by mail, and they essentially gave us the same response.

While we had no luck with the "scheduled task for test run" approach, we eventually managed to get it working by running the Octopus Tentacle as a process rather than a service.

The challenge here was making sure the Tentacle would start when our test machine started. We wanted this to happen automatically, so RDPing in and starting the process every time was out of the question (this also caused some additional problems for the UI test run...).

The final working solution was to schedule a task that would start the Octopus Tentacle as an interactive process whenever the machine booted (i.e. run Tentacle.exe directly), and then make sure we never RDP to this machine. Make sure the task has sufficient privileges, and that it "Runs whether the user is logged in or not". Also, remember to disable automatic startup of the Octopus Tentacle Service.

Edit: We had some trouble making this solution work across all our environments. It seems that for security reasons, newer versions of Windows are quite skeptical about allowing scheduled tasks to start interactive processes when there is no user logged on.

We did another search for possible solutions, and came across FireDaemon Pro (commercial software), which allows us to register interactive Windows services that run under a domain user. Not quite sure how it works, but they seem to be able to run a UI from a Windows service in session0 (the UI is also isolated). The Octopus Tentacle starts without complain, and the UI tests run the way we want them to.