What’s so great about WebDriver?

Mark Winteringham

@mwtestconsult

linkedin.com/in/markwinteringham

www.mwtestconsultancy.co.uk

• Freelance Technical Tester

• ‘Understanding and testing RESTful Web services’ – London Tester Gathering Workshop - Thursday 4th June

• 8 Years experience

• Broadcasting, publishing, professional audio and public sectors.

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You don't need to learn programming to Test... but it helps

Mark Winteringham

Automation: Time to change our models

Iain McCowatt

‘Look at the world through a different pair of lenses every time you have a problem’

www.ministryoftesting.com/2014/05/automation-time-change-models-iain-mccowatt/

Mental models

Jim wants to automate checking a service validates a

range of payloads correctly

Jim builds a script in WebDriver via the UI the

service consumes

It results in automation that’s slow and brittle

Jim continues to tinker with the script

It’s too hard!

‘Automator Jim’ knows WebDriver

What if Jim knew about a different tool such as JMeter or SOAPUI?

‘We shape our tools and then our tools shape us’

industryweek.com

Marshall McLuhan

‘Be promiscuous’

What if Jim isn’t even aware that these tools exist or that he could benefit in learning them in the first place

But..

Learn more models, learn more tools

What if we as a testing community collectively have limited mental models about automation and are consequently feeding the same limited mental models back to testers like Jim

The question

Automation workshops/talks in conferences

WebDriver/Selenium, 17

Watir, 1

API, 2

Big Data, 2

Unit Testing, 2

BDD, 5

Monitoring, 2Security Testing, 1

WebDriver/Selenium

Watir

API

Big Data

Unit Testing

BDD

Monitoring

Security Testing

Talks and workshops that explicitly talk about an automation tool

5 Popular conferences 2012 – 2015

Automation tools in Job specs67 Jobs roles

Keywords:• Developer in test• Automation test engineer

Source: cwjobs.co.uk – 23/1/15Selenium / WebDriver, 57

Cucumber, 22

*unit, 22

QTP, 12

SoapUI/LoadUI, 9

SQL, 6

JBehave, 5

TestNG, 5

Test Complete, 5

Appium, 4

Calabash, 4

Fitnesse

Jasmine

Karma

JMock

Fitnesse

Capybara

Jmeter

Rational

Watin

Visual Studios

Ranorex

Specflow

LoadRunner

Webload

Siege

BurpSuite

Rspec

Behat

Mink

EasyMock

Espresso

What’s so great about WebDriver?

It offers limited mental models –Automating through the UI!

WebDriver/Selenium

53%

Watir3%

API7%

Big Data6%

Unit Testing6%

BDD16%

Monitoring6%

Security Testing3%

http://watirmelon.com/2011/06/10/yet-another-software-testing-pyramid/

=/

Where are the workshops or requirements for skills in:

MonitoringDeployment

Test data population

Configuration Management

Parsing data

API Testing

Unit testing

So what could we do?

Look further afield to learn new tools Tinker around with other tools

Personal

Community

Demand more diversity in automation training

When writing job roles focus more on the problems that need solving

Think more about the problem you want to solve, is your current model enough?

Detox ourselves from WebDriver… maybe with a bit of Watir

Thank you

Questions?