The document outlines a structured approach to using Selenium for writing business-valued, reusable, and maintainable tests. Key steps include preparing oneself with a test strategy, writing effective tests, leveraging Selenium's features, and implementing a robust framework. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of resilience, preparation for use, and scaling testing processes for teams.

1. How To Use Selenium,
Successfully
by Dave Haeffner, @TourDeDave

2. http://www.wpclipart.com/geography/features/chasm.png.html

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_solutions_for_Rubik's_Cube

4. Write business valuable tests that are
reusable, maintainable and
resilient.
!
Then package them for humans and
robots — and scale them for you &
your team.

5. 1. Prepare Yourself
• Define a Test Strategy
• Pick a Programming Language
• Choose a Text Editor

6. Define a Test Strategy
1. How does your business make money?
2. How do your users user your application?
3. What browsers are your users using?
4. What things have broken before?
Outcome: What to test and which
browsers to care about

7. Pick a
Programming Language
• Same language as the app?
• Who will own it?
• Build a framework or use an existing one?
• http://bit.ly/seleniumframeworks
• What about a scripting language?

8. Choose a Text Editor
• Emacs
• IntelliJ
• Vim
• Sublime Text

9. 2. Write Tests Well
• Atomic
• Autonomous
• Descriptive
• Small batches
• For a test runner
• Stored in Version Control

10. 3. Leverage Selenium
Fundamentals
• Mimics human action
• Uses a few common actions
• Works with “locators”
Locators tell Selenium which HTML
element a command refers to

11. Locator Strategies
• Class
• CSS selectors
• ID
• Link Text
• Partial Link Text
• Tag Name
• XPath
Good locators are:
• unique
• descriptive
• unlikely to change
That rules a few of these out

12. Locator Strategies
• Class
• CSS selectors
• ID
• Link Text
• Partial Link Text
• Tag Name
• XPath
Good locators are:
• unique
• descriptive
• unlikely to change
That rules a few of these out

13. Locator Strategies
• Class!
• CSS selectors
• ID!
• Link Text
• Partial Link Text
• Tag Name
• XPath
Good locators are:
• unique
• descriptive
• unlikely to change
That rules a few of these out
Start with IDs and Classes

14. Locator Strategies
• Class!
• CSS selectors!
• ID!
• Link Text
• Partial Link Text
• Tag Name
• XPath
Good locators are:
• unique
• descriptive
• unlikely to change
That rules a few of these out
Start with IDs and Classes
Use CSS or XPath sanely

15. Locator Strategies
• Class!
• CSS selectors!
• ID!
• Link Text
• Partial Link Text
• Tag Name
• XPath
CSS vs XPath
http://bit.ly/seleniumbenchmarks
http://bit.ly/cssxpathexamples

16. Finding Quality Locators
• Inspect the page
• Verify your selection
• e.g., FirePath or FireFinder
• http://bit.ly/verifyinglocators
• Learn through gaming
• http://bit.ly/locatorgame

17. Common Selenium actions
• click
• clear
• send_keys
• text
• displayed?
Look up your language’s bindings
http://bit.ly/seleniumwiki

18. A Login Example
1. Visit the main page of a site
2. Find the login button and click it!
3. Find the login form’s username field and input text!
4. Find the login form’s password field and input text!
5. Find the submit button and click it

19. http://the-internet.herokuapp.com/login

21. 4. Write Re-usable/
Maintainable Test Code
• Page Object Pattern
• Facade layer (a.k.a. Base Page Object)

22. Web Page
Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5
X X X X X

23. Page
Object
Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5
Web Page
X
X X X X X

26. Selenium
Commands
Page
Object 1
Page
Object 2
Page
Object 3
Page
Object 4
Page
Object 5

27. Base Page
Object
Page
Object 1
Page
Object 2
Page
Object 3
Page
Object 4
Page
Object 5
Selenium
Commands
• Insulates you from
Selenium API changes
http://bit.ly/se-upgrade
• More readable
• Global reuse

30. 5. Make Your
Tests Resilient

31. Explicit waits
• Specify an amount of time, and an action
• Selenium will try until either:
• The action can be accomplished, or
• The amount of time has been reached (and throw
a timeout exception)

32. Selenium::WebDriver::Wait.new(timeout: 10).until do!
is_displayed? FINISH_TEXT!
end
Added to base page

33. 6. Prep for use
• Central setup/teardown
• Folder structure
• Config file(s)
• Tagging
• Reporting (screenshots, JUnit XML, etc.)
• Command-line execution wrapper

34. Central setup/teardown

35. A simple file/folder structure
configs/
pages/
spec/
vendor/
Gemfile
Rakefile

36. Tagging
• Test packs
• Some tagging ideas
• wip
• critical
• component name
• slow
• story number
What this looks like in RSpec
http://bit.ly/rspectagging

37. Reporting
• For robots: JUnit XML output
• http://bit.ly/rspec-junit
• For humans: screenshots, video, logs, etc.

38. Human Readable

39. Robot Ready

40. 7. Scale It
• Scaled execution
• 3rd party cloud provider, your own grid, etc.
• Parallelization
• Continuous Integration

41. Cloud execution
http://saucelabs.com

42. cloud_config.rb

43. spec_helper.rb

44. Parallelization
• In code
• with threads: http://bit.ly/seleniumparallel1
• with processes: http://bit.ly/seleniumparallel2
• Through a test runner (e.g., TestNG in Java)
• Through your CI server
#protip enforce random order execution of tests

45. Continuous Integration
• Feedback loops
• Code promotion

46. Feedback loops
• The goal: Find failures early and often
• Notifications
• Email, chat, SMS
• In-person (audio & visual)

47. Code
Committed
Integration
(pass?)
Deploy to
autom. test
server
(success?)
Run
automated
tests
(pass?)
Deploy to
manual test
server
(manual)
(success?)
yes
yes
yes
Notify team if no
Code Promotion
Bonus points: stop the line

48. Simple Jenkins configuration
1. Create a Job
2. Pull In Your Test Code
3. Set up Build Triggers
4. Configure Build steps
5. Configure Test Reports
6. Set up Notifications
7. Run Tests & View The Results
Don’t forget about
a systems check!

49. Steps to solve the puzzle
1. Prepare yourself
2. Write tests well
3. Leverage Selenium fundamentals
4. Write re-usable & maintainable test code
5. Make your tests resilient
6. Prep everything for use
7. Scale it for you and your team

50. Write business valuable tests that are
reusable, maintainable and
resilient.
!
Then package them for humans and
robots — and scale them for you &
your team.

51. –Dave Haeffner, @TourDeDave
“You may think your puzzle is unique. But really, everyone is
trying to solve the same puzzle. Yours is just configured
differently — and it’s solvable”

52. http://SeleniumGuidebook.com

53. d
http://ElementalSelenium.com