How To Use Selenium, Successfully

by Dave Haeffner, @TourDeDave

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

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

1. Preparation

• Define a Test Strategy

• Pick a Programming Language

• Choose a Text Editor

On Defining a Test Strategy1. 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

On Picking 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?

On Choosing a Text Editor

• Emacs

• IntelliJ

• Vim

• Sublime Text

2. Write Tests Well• Atomic

• Autonomous

• Descriptive

• Succinct

• For a test runner

• Stored in Version Control

3. Selenium Fundamentals

• Mimics human action

• Uses a few common actions

• Works with “locators”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common Selenium actions

• click

• clear

• send_keys

• text

• displayed?

Look up your language’s bindings http://bit.ly/seleniumwiki

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

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

4. Write Re-usable/Maintainable Test Code

• Page Object Pattern

• Facade layer (a.k.a. Base Page Object)

5. Make Your Tests Resilient

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)

Added to base page

Put to use in a page object

6. Prepping for use (for humans and robots)

• Central setup/teardown

• Folder structure

• Config file(s)

• Tagging

• Reporting (screenshots, JUnit XML, etc.)

• Command-line execution wrapper

Central setup/teardown

A simple file/folder structureconfigs/

pages/

spec/

vendor/

Gemfile

Rakefile

Tagging• Test packs

• Some tagging ideas

• wip

• critical

• component name

• slow

• story number

What this looks like in RSpec http://bit.ly/rspectagging

Reporting

• For robots: JUnit XML output

• http://bit.ly/rspec-junit

• For humans: screenshots, video, logs, etc.

Human Readable

Robot Ready

7. Scale It

• Scaled execution (e.g., 3rd party cloud provider)

• Parallelization

• Continuous Integration

Cloud execution

http://saucelabs.com

cloud_config.rb

spec_helper.rb

Parallelization (can be done)

• 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

Continuous Integration

• Feedback loops

• Code promotion

Feedback loops• The goal: Find failures early and often

• Notification types

• Email, chat, SMS

• In-person (audio & visual)

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: break the build

Simple Jenkins configuration1. 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!

Write business valuable tests that are reusable, maintainable and resilient. !

Then package them for humans and robots — and scale them for you & your team.

–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”

http://SeleniumGuidebook.com

d

http://ElementalSelenium.com