INTRODUCTION TO WEB

BROWSER AUTOMATION

Péter Csapó

Szilárd Mikó

Norber Bauman

EPAM Systems, Budapest, 2016

Agenda

Record and Replay1

Selenium-Webdriver2

Challenges / Best practices3

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RECORD AND REPLAY

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Record and Replay

• Record exact user interactions previously performed by the tester

• Easy to create test cases

• Ineffective repetition

• Limited options

• Limited verification capabilities

• e.g. Selenium IDE, , QTP, TestComplete

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SELENIUM WEBDRIVER

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Script->Driver->Browser

• Selenium Webdriver

• Selenium Grid

• Watir

• Capybara

• PhantomJS

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Script->Driver->Browser structure

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Browsers

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Supported OS

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Supported Programming Languages

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Example:

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://www.google.hu");

driver.FindElement(By.Name("q")).SendKeys("Selenium");

driver.FindElement(By.Name("btnG")).Click();

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver,

TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));

wait.Until(ExpectedConditions.ElementIsVisible

(By.LinkText("Képek")));

driver.FindElement(By.LinkText("Képek")).Click();

Assert.IsTrue(driver.FindElement(By.Id("rg_s")).Displayed);

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What can you do with a browser?

• Navigate to url

• get title, get url

• take screenshot

• refresh page,

• close browser/tab

• Send keys

• execute script

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HTML element locator strategy

• Example: driver.FindElement(By.Name("btnG"))

• Most widely used attributes and techniques by order of

preference:

–

– linkText, partialLinkText

– tag, class

– css

– xpath

• Avoid css and xpath for performance and maintainability

reasons

• A good locator strategy is the difference between

maintainable and brittle automation code

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Choosing a good locator strategy

• the element’s ID:

• IDs are (should be) unique on the page. the fastest and the best. Use it!

• use name when IDs are not available

• text:

• Easy to code

• acceptable only when single language is used, no changes are expected

• not necessarily unique, high maintenance

• CSS selectors:

• Like XPATH only better. Will solve 98% of your problems

• XPath:

• Last resort only - extremely powerful, but the slowest. Needs skill.

• Native XPATH: html/body/div/table[5]/tbody/tr/td[2]/div/a/b – very brittle

• Relative XPATH: //div[@id = 'foo']//a - not so brittle but slow

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HTML Elements methods

• Element type:

• IWebElement

• Most frequently used methods:

• Clear, Click, FindElement, FindElements, GetAttribute, SendKeys, Submit

• Example:

driver.FindElement(By.Name("btnG")).Click()

• Whatever a real user can do, selenium should be able to do as

well

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CHALLENGES

BEST PRACTICES

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Challenges - Wait

• You can use explicit wait to handle

exceptional cases

• modern web pages pull a lot of data after DOM complete

• Worst case scenario: sleep

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver,

TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));

wait.Until(d => d.FindElement(By.LinkText("Képek")).Enabled);

• Implicit wait:

• WebDriver waits for the DOM to complete loading before trying to manage the browser or locate an element, but no more than that by default

• Implicit wait can be changed

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Challenges – Browser differences

• Major functionality is consistent but there can be

subtle differences in:

• Browser size

• Screenshots

• Element visibility

• Performance

• Native events

• Cookie management

• IE is the worst offender

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Cross Browser testing solutions

• crossbrowsertesting.com

• Browsers including older versions, OS

• Supports lab environment

• webpagetest.org

• Performance data – including visual comparison

• support for browsers, mobile, scripts, api to automate

• Physical location

• saucelabs.com

• automated cross browser testing (selenium) in the cloud

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The future…

• All big web based companies rely heavily on test

automation

• Google

• YahooMail

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

• Ship early, ship often

• Difference between dev and QA is disappearing

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Questions