Prevent Test Automation Shelfware: A Selenium-WebDriver Case Study

6/2/15

1

©2015 Eid Passport, Inc. All rights reserved.©2015 Eid Passport, Inc. All rights reserved.
How to Prevent Test
Automation Shelfware:
A Selenium-WebDriver Case Study
Alan Ark
aark@eidpassport.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/arkie
©2015 Eid Passport, Inc. All rights reserved.
Goals
2
Introduction to Selenium
Tips and Tricks
Pitfalls to Avoid
Ask questions as we go!

6/2/15

2

Watir?
Web Application Testing in Ruby
A different open source project that drives
browsers for test automation
What is Selenium?
A tool to automate browsers!
Quick regression testing across many browsers
Automate web based admin tasks

6/2/15

3

Why Selenium over Watir?
Choice
More widely supported
More bindings available
Regression testing!
Repetitive test efforts
Time consuming
Reproducible tests across many browsers

6/2/15

4

Automation of web based admin tasks!
Creation of data
Reading of records on the browser
Updating of content
Deletion of records
What version of Selenium?
Don’t use Selenium 1.0 - Selenium IDE
Recorder is deprecated
Javascript Injection to drive a browser
Selenium 2 uses WebDriver
http://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/

6/2/15

5

WebDriver?
A platform and language-neutral interface that
allows programs or scripts to introspect into, and
control the behaviour of, a web browser
http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-
webdriver-20130117/
How do I start?
Pick a language!
Java
C#
python
ruby
others supported as well

6/2/15

6

Pick your browser/driver
Firefox
Chrome
IE
Safari
many more!
How do I interact with the browser?
Dev tools are built-in to browsers
Inspect the HTML to glean the locators to use
var
inputElement
=

driver.FindElement(By.Name("myButton"));

inputElement.Click();

6/2/15

7

Built-in locators
Use these if you can
driver.FindElement(By.Name("myName"));

driver.FindElement(By.Id("myId"));

driver.FindElement(By.ClassName("myClass"));

others as well

XPath vs. CSS
XPath
//div[.
='Some
Text
of
the
Div']

CSS

table[id='tblBadgeInfo']
thead
td

Speed considerations?

6/2/15

8

Tips to avoid headaches….
GUI based tests sometimes thought of as fragile,
brittle or unreliable
How to prevent your Selenium automation from
becoming shelfware
Use unique locators
Very difficult if locators are not unique
Avoid using index numbers
Ask for some name/id/class on UI elements from
the development team

6/2/15

9

Do not use hard coded sleeps
Makes test scripts brittle when run on different
environments.

//
Sleep
for
5
seconds

Thread.Sleep(5000);

button.Click();

Use a polling wait
Be flexible and return as soon as possible but
ignore exceptions

6/2/15

10

Use WebDriverWait
WebDriverWait
wait
=
new
WebDriverWait(driver,

TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30));

IWebElement
myDynamicElement
=

wait.Until<IWebElement>((d)
=>

{

return
d.FindElement(By.Id("myButtonId"));

});

Use ExpectedConditions
Convenience methods on things that are checked
often. Use these with WebDriverWait.
http://selenium.googlecode.com/git/docs/api/
dotnet/html/
AllMembers_T_OpenQA_Selenium_Support_UI_E
xpectedConditions.htm

6/2/15

11

Use Page Objects
Isolate UI elements from the test cases
If the UI changes, your tests only need to be
modified in a single place - the Page Object that
defines the UI
Reduces duplicate code
Login Page Example

6/2/15

12

Login Page Object
class
LoginPage
:
BasePage
{

public
LoginPage()
{}

public
void
Login(string
username,string
password)
{

var
nameElement
=
driver.FindElement(By.Name("username"));

nameElement.SendKeys(username);

var
passElement
=
driver.FindElement(By.Name("password"));

passElement.SendKeys(password);

var
submitButton
=
driver.FindElement(By.Name("submit"));

submitButton.Click();

}

}

Login Test Case

var
loginPage
=
new
LoginPage();

loginPage.Login("user","pass");

6/2/15

13

Verify your assumptions….
Are you where you think you are?
Verify page elements on transitions
Clicked links
Form submission
AJAX transitions
Be Generous with your logging
Overlogging is better than underlogging
Easier to examine output files to see where
failures are occurring
Especially true for remote execution
Use logging to get a trail on most events

6/2/15

14

Things I like to log
URL of the page
Timestamp
Values used on assertions
Values used on comparators
Values used on loops
IE Considerations
Sometimes click appears to do “nothing”
Use SendKeys instead of Click
https://www.google.com/webhp?q=ie+click
+selenium

6/2/15

15

SendKeys Code
Instead of
button.Click();

Use
button.SendKeys(Keys.Enter);

Handling Frames
Be sure to set the focus to the frame hosting your
elements.
IWebElement
mainFrame
=

driver.FindElement(By.Name("MainFrame"));

driver.SwitchTo().Frame(mainFrame);

6/2/15

16

Handling Dialogs
Javascript alerts
Javascript confirm
Javascript prompts

Example code
try
{

driver.SwitchTo().Alert();

return
true;

}

catch
(NoAlertPresentException)
{

//
Modal
dialog
is
not
displayed

return
false;

}

6/2/15

17

Handling Popup windows
var
windowHandles
=
driver.WindowHandles;

//
if
handle
0
is
the
main
window
then
handle
1

//
is
the
popup,
otherwise
the
popup
is
handle
0

var
popUp
=
(windowHandles[0]
==

mainWindowHandle
?
windowHandles[1]
:

windowHandles[0]);

driver.SwitchTo().Window(popUp);

<do
stuff>

driver.SwitchTo().Window(mainWindowHandle);

Not the only answer...
Sometimes Selenium can’t do the job.
AutoIt can be used as a fall-back.
https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/

6/2/15

18

Browser login prompts
Advanced Topics
Use with Continuous Integration tools
Remote control of tests
Selenium Grid

6/2/15

19

Summary
Instrument your framework correctly and Selenium
tests can be very good for you
Don’t be discouraged. Try different things.
Investigate to see what Selenium can do for you
The End
38
Enjoy the journey
and
Have fun!

6/2/15

20

Thank you!
39
Questions/Comments?
Contact Info:
Alan Ark
aark@eidpassport.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/arkie

Prevent Test Automation Shelfware: A Selenium-WebDriver Case Study

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (17)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (17)

Similar to Prevent Test Automation Shelfware: A Selenium-WebDriver Case Study

Similar to Prevent Test Automation Shelfware: A Selenium-WebDriver Case Study (20)

More from TechWell

More from TechWell (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Prevent Test Automation Shelfware: A Selenium-WebDriver Case Study