Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

Dima Kovalenko

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783982707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Programmation Web

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.

Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

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Table of Contents

Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

Credits

Foreword

About the Author

Acknowledgments

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Writing the First Test

Choosing Selenium over other tools

Right tool for the right job

Price

Open source

Flexibility

The Record and Playback pattern

Advantages of the Record and Playback pattern

Disadvantages of the Record and Playback pattern

Getting started with the Selenium IDE

Installing the Selenium IDE

Recording our first test

Saving the test

Understanding Selenium commands

Reading Selenese

Comparing Ruby to Selenese

Comparing Selenium commands in multiple languages

Writing a Selenium test in Ruby

Introducing Test::Unit

Introducing asserts

Interactive test debugging

Summary

2. The Spaghetti Pattern

Introducing the Spaghetti pattern

Advantages of the Spaghetti pattern

Disadvantages of the Spaghetti pattern

Testing the product review functionality

Starting a product review test

Locating elements on the page

Using a browser's element inspector

Introducing locator strategies

Using advanced locator strategies

Using the absolute path

Using the relative path

Writing locator strategy code

Using chained selector strategy methods

Using the CSS selector

Using XPath

Implementing clicks and assertions

Duplicating the product review test

Reasons for failures

The Chain Linked pattern

The Big Ball of Mud pattern

Summary

3. Refactoring Tests

Refactoring tests

The DRY testing pattern

Advantages of the DRY testing pattern

Disadvantages of the DRY testing pattern

Moving code into a setup and teardown

Removing duplication with methods

Removing external test goals

Using a method to fill out the review form

Reviewing the refactored code

The Hermetic test pattern

Advantages of the Hermetic test pattern

Disadvantages of the Hermetic test pattern

Removing test-on-test dependence

Using timestamps as test data

Extracting the remaining common actions to methods

Creating a new review with a single method call

Reviewing the test-on-test dependency refactoring

Creating generic DRY methods

Refactoring with generic methods

The random run order principle

Advantages of the random run order principle

Disadvantages of the random run order principle

Summary

4. Data-driven Testing

Data relevance versus data accessibility

Hardcoding input data

Hiding test data from tests

Choosing the test environment

Introducing test fixtures

Parsing fixture data

Using fixture data in the tests

Using fixtures to validate products

Testing the remaining products

Multiple test models

A single test model

Implementing multiple test models

Making test failures more expressive

Using an API as a source of fixture data

Using data stubs

The default values pattern

Advantages of the default values pattern

Disadvantages of the default values pattern

Merging the default values pattern and the faker library

Implementing faker methods

Updating the comment test to use default values

Summary

5. Stabilizing the Tests

Engineering the culture of stability

Running fast and failing fast

Running as often as possible

Keeping a clean and consistent environment

Discarding bad code changes

Maintaining a stable test suite

Waiting for AJAX

Testing without AJAX delays

Using explicit delays to test AJAX forms

Implementing intelligent delays

Waiting for JavaScript animations

The Action Wrapper pattern

Advantages of the Action Wrapper pattern

Disadvantages of the Action Wrapper pattern

Implementing the Action Wrapper pattern

The Black Hole Proxy pattern

Advantages of the Black Hole Proxy pattern

Disadvantages of the Black Hole Proxy pattern

Implementing the Black Hole Proxy pattern

Test your tests!

Summary

6. Testing the Behavior

Behavior-driven Development

Advantages of BDD

Disadvantages of BDD

Testing the shopping cart behavior

Describing shopping cart behavior

Writing step definitions

Is BDD right for my project?

Introducing Cucumber

Feature files

Step definition files

The configuration directory

Cucumber.yml

env.rb

Running the Cucumber suite

The write once, test everywhere pattern

Advantages of the write once, test everywhere pattern

Disadvantages of the write once, test everywhere pattern

Testing a mobile site

Updating the Selenium wrapper

Moving step definition files

Updating the Cucumber profile and tagging tests

Running and fixing incompatible steps

Testing the purchase API

Summary

7. The Page Objects Pattern

Understanding objects

Describing a literal object

Object properties

Object actions

Objects within objects

Describing a programming object

Describing a web page with objects

The Page Objects pattern

Advantages of the Page Objects pattern

Disadvantages of the Page Objects pattern

Creating a Page Objects framework

Creating a page super class

Implementing sidebar objects

Implementing the Sidebar...