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Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

By : Kovalenko
3.9 (11)
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Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

3.9 (11)
By: Kovalenko

Overview of this book

Selenium WebDriver is a global leader in automated web testing. It empowers users to perform complex testing scenarios with its simple and powerful interface. This guide will provide you with all the skills you need to successfully create a functional Selenium test suite. Starting from the very beginning of the Selenium IDE, this book will show you how to transition into a real programing language such as Ruby or Java. You will quickly learn how to improve your code quality with refactoring and the skills needed to plan for the future development of your website to future-proof your test suite. With ample test examples running against a life-like e-commerce store and detailed step-by-step code review and explanations, you will be ready to test any challenge web developers might throw your way. This book is intended for anyone who wants to create a test suite that is easy to maintain by expanding your knowledge until you feel truly confident and comfortable with Selenium.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
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Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
1. Writing the First Test
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1. Writing the First Test
Choosing Selenium over other tools
The Record and Playback pattern
Getting started with the Selenium IDE
Understanding Selenium commands
Comparing Ruby to Selenese
Comparing Selenium commands in multiple languages
Writing a Selenium test in Ruby
Summary
2
2. The Spaghetti Pattern
2. The Spaghetti Pattern
Introducing the Spaghetti pattern
Testing the product review functionality
Reasons for failures
The Chain Linked pattern
The Big Ball of Mud pattern
Summary
3
3. Refactoring Tests
3. Refactoring Tests
Refactoring tests
The DRY testing pattern
The Hermetic test pattern
Creating generic DRY methods
The random run order principle
Summary
4
4. Data-driven Testing
4. Data-driven Testing
Data relevance versus data accessibility
Hardcoding input data
Introducing test fixtures
Using an API as a source of fixture data
Using data stubs
The default values pattern
Summary
5
5. Stabilizing the Tests
5. Stabilizing the Tests
Engineering the culture of stability
Waiting for AJAX
Waiting for JavaScript animations
The Action Wrapper pattern
The Black Hole Proxy pattern
Test your tests!
Summary
6
6. Testing the Behavior
6. Testing the Behavior
Behavior-driven Development
Testing the shopping cart behavior
Introducing Cucumber
Running the Cucumber suite
The write once, test everywhere pattern
Testing a mobile site
Testing the purchase API
Summary
7
7. The Page Objects Pattern
7. The Page Objects Pattern
Understanding objects
The Page Objects pattern
Creating a Page Objects framework
Running tests with the Page Objects framework
The test tool independence pattern
The right way to implement Page Objects
Summary
8
8. Growing the Test Suite
8. Growing the Test Suite
Strategies for writing test suites
Continuous Integration
Frequently Asked Questions
Summary
9
A. Getting Started with Selenium
A. Getting Started with Selenium
Setting up the computer
Understanding test class naming
Summary
10
Index
Index

Getting started with the Selenium IDE

Now, let's get our hands dirty! We will be playing with Selenium Interactive Development Environment (Selenium IDE or simply IDE) in this section. IDE is one of the greatest starting points for the Selenium project. It allows someone who has never programmed in his or her life to record a useful test in a matter of minutes and start adding new tests to the test suite in no time.

Installing the Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE is a browser plugin that only works in Firefox browser. It is easy to install and integrates well with the functionality of the browser. Use these easy-to-follow steps to install the IDE in the browser:

  1. In your Firefox browser, navigate to the Selenium website at http://seleniumhq.org:
    Installing the Selenium IDE
  2. Click on the Download Selenium link on the home page shown:
    Installing the Selenium IDE
  3. In the Selenium IDE section on the Download page, click on the link for the latest released version, as shown here:
    Installing the Selenium IDE
  4. Allow Selenium to be installed on your computer by clicking on Allow on the following permission dialog:
    Installing the Selenium IDE
  5. The following dialog will show you all of the Selenium IDE components that will be installed on your browser. Click on Install Now when it becomes clickable after several seconds. The installation dialog is shown in the following screenshot:
    Installing the Selenium IDE
  6. Restart Firefox.

    Now that the plugins have been installed, you should see a little icon in the browser:

    Installing the Selenium IDE
  7. Clicking on that button will reveal the Selenium IDE window, as shown in the following screenshot:
    Installing the Selenium IDE

We are now ready to go!

Recording our first test

Just like many commercial testing tools, the Selenium IDE supports the Record-Playback style of writing tests. The IDE monitors your browser and notes down any actions that you perform. By compiling a list of actions, a test slowly emerges. Let's start recording our first test by following these steps:

  1. Open the Selenium IDE in the Firefox browser and make sure the recording mode is on, as shown in following screenshot:
    Recording our first test

    Note

    Note that the recording indicator is a little difficult to read since it does not change color when on or off. The main difference is a slightly light gray square around the button when it's on. This is one of several major drawbacks of Selenium IDE.

  2. In a new tab, navigate to http://awful-valentine.com, as shown in the following screenshot:
    Recording our first test
  3. Click on the search text field and type in cheese in the search bar and click on the submit button. The following screenshot shows the search box and the submit button:
    Recording our first test

    As we are performing these actions, the IDE is recording all of them in the background. We can inspect all of the recorded actions in the IDE window, as shown in the following screenshot:

    Recording our first test

Let's walk through the table inside the IDE window to get a better understanding of each item.

The table has three columns in it:

  • The first column is Command. This is where the action of the command is defined, such as a click or type.
  • The second column is Target, where the command will be performed.
  • Finally, the third column is Value. This section is only used when the target element, such as a text field, needs some text inserted into it.

We have our simple script now; let's save it so we can reuse it later.

Saving the test

Our next step is to save the test run to a file:

  1. Click on the File option:
    Saving the test
  2. Choose Save Test Case.
  3. Name the file search_test.html and save it.

Notice that we saved the test as an HTML file. This is because Selenese, the language that the IDE uses to record and playback tests, is just an HTML table. You can even open the search_test.html file in your web browser and see how it looks! In the following screenshot, we have Selenium IDE and the saved test opens side by side for easy comparison:

Saving the test

Right away, you can see that the IDE (on the left) and the saved Selenese output displayed in a web browser (on the right) look extremely similar.

End of Section 4
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