Publishing test assemblies with artifacts in order to use them during functional tests on VSTS

Question

I am having a really hard time trying to figure out how to properly configure functional tests on my realease pipeline. I have a solution that contains some web projects being built using the default build configuration in VSTS. The artifact is ok and I can publish them using a release pipeline. So far so good, now I want to implement functional tests using CodedUI and have them integrated on my releases. We have a development server with a vsagent that was installed when I configured the deployment group. I then installed manually a vstest agent using a tool that I have downloaded here.

I then added a new task on my release pipeline: VsTest configured as follows

This is the log output from the test task in my release pipeline where it says that no test assemblies were found:

My build task:

And this is my artifact package that doesnt seems to have any test assemblies, only web projects:

So basically, how do I publish my test assemblies in order to use them in my release pipeline? Am I doing it right packing the test assemblies together with my web projects artifacts?

Benefactor

Answer 1

You can try to copy the Test Assemblies to $(build.artifactstagingdirectory) and publish with the artifact.

Alternately you can try to add another Copy Task and Publish Build Artifacts task or directly use Copy and Publish Build Artifacts task to copy the Test Assemblies and publish them as another Artifact.

Hoofed

Note: now the "Copy and Publish" task is deprecated, so I went with the two separate tasks. – Osteomyelitis

How come the copy and publish step comes after the vsTest step? should'nt it be before if the message from the testin step is that testing cannot find the test assemblies? – Polyphone

I only needed the copy step (before the publishing step), the publishing was then automatic through the existing publishing step. – Parbuckle

Answer 2

I had a related issue, but was able to fix it by changing the search folder from the template default $(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory) to $(Agent.BuildDirectory). This way I do not need to create a copy task.

My tests are located in a separate project.

Erroneous

Hi Halling, can you explain your process a bit more. I'm trying to implement the same thing. – Magner

Notice the last line called searchFolder. I changed the value to $(Agent.BuildDirectory). - task: VSTest@2 inputs: testSelector: 'testAssemblies' testAssemblyVer2: | **test.dll !**\obj** !**\xunit.runner.visualstudio.testadapter.dll !**\xunit.runner.visualstudio.dotnetcore.testadapter.dll searchFolder: '$(Agent.BuildDirectory)' – Erroneous

So near yet so far. I cannot believe I'm in the same boat in 2021. Just cannot figure out this syntax. It's insane. – Marchand

Answer 3

You need to publish a separate artifact containing your test assemblies.

Elianore

Could you explain how can I achieve this? In my MSBuild task I have the parameter /p:PackageLocation="$(build.artifactstagingdirectory)\\" how I am supposed to get those test assemblies from that (I am going to have multiple test projects, basically, one test project to each web project)? – Benefactor