1. Selenium
Automation Testing with
Selenium
Wien, 21. Oktober,
2010
Monica
Nanu

2. Summary
Selenium – General overview
Risks and structuring the test project
Showcase: Implementation for TEMPO

3. Selenium – General Overview
What is Selenium? The Selenium components
Steps in developing automation tests
Future development – Selenium 2.0

4. Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web application testing across many
platforms.
What is Selenium
Framework for automation testing tool for web applications
IDE for record / playback → creation of tests → learning language
DSL for writing test scripts in Java, Ruby and others
Support for all major browsers
Selenium components
Selenium IDE
Selenium Remote Control
Selenium Grid
Selenium – General Overview

5. ●
Steps:
Selenium IDE: Record and playback
Selenium IDE: Export as Java code
Selenium RC: Execute Java(Eclipse-Junit)
Selenium GRID: distribute on various
environments
Selenium – General Overview

6. Selenium commands (Selenese)
A set of commands that run the tests for a web-
based application:
check if the correct UI elements exist;
check the specific content of the UI elements;
check that all links are functional;
check data entry field (input of data and check of
the values);
checks the option selection on different UI
elements (radio buttons, check boxes, drop down
lists);
checks the form submit options;
check for applications using Ajax calls.
There are 3 Types of commands:
Actions - commands that manage the state of
the application
“click link”, “select option”, Fail = the execution of the test
case stops/ends, ...AndWait – a post-back is set and
Selenium waits until the execution is completed
Accessors – check the state of the variables
that are used in Assert commands
Assertions – check that the state of the
aplication is exactly what and how is expected.
E.g.. “the title of the page is ”abc” or that “checkbox
is selected”. There are 3 methods to check:
“assert” (the test stops),
“verify”(error is logged and the test
continues )
” waitFor” (awaits until a restriction is
aquired – used for testing applications with
Selenium – General Overview

7. Client library : Transforms the Java calls into server commands, by encoding it into the
“Selenese” network protocol (on top of HTTP) and sending it to the Selenium server.
E.g. “start browser”, “click-to”...
Server component: Listens for commands from clients (on a TCP socket) and performs
actions accordingly.
E.g. starting web-browser or forwarding “user interaction” to the web-browser and delivering back
the result to the client.
Selenium – General Overview

8. Speeds up functional testing of web-applications by leveraging the existing computing
infrastructure;
Allows easily running multiple tests in parallel, on multiple machines, in an
heterogeneous environment;
Allows running multiple instances of Selenium Remote Control in parallel. Even better, it
makes all these Selenium Remote Controls appear as a single one, so the tests do not
have to worry about the actual infrastructure;
Selenium Grid cuts down on the time required to run a Selenium test suite to a fraction
of the time that a single instance of Selenium instance would take to run.
Selenium – General Overview

9. Strong Points:
Open source tool for web application (no license costs, large community for support and cont. dev.);
support for multi platform and multi browser in terms of coverage;
DOM testing – simple and strong;
The TC are stable, for mature versions;
Supports testing AJAX applications;
Allows building flexible testing scenarios within the power of Java.
Weak Points:
Error diagnoze and reporting;
Upon UI changes, the scripts need update (general for all automation tools);
It is state dependent (html driven);
May require more knowledge (learning effort may be high in the beginning).
Future and actual Selenium projects:
Selenium 2.0 (Selenium + WebDriver)
Drivers: HtmlUnit / Firefox / IE / Chrome
Selenium – review

10. Starting point: Test Plan
Functionality tree and initial evaluation of total effort (main functionalities and test cases)
Manual versus Automation testing
Risk evaluation
Decision for the solution of automation testing
GUI and usability
Performance
Regressions and others
Main risks to evaluate for automation:
No automation - The quality of the testing and the time invested
The cost of development and maintenance of the automated tests
Result: We implement the automation testing in a structured layered architecture using Selenium
Selenium – review

11. Test Project Structure
Working together with Development and QA to implement the test framework structure.
separate test-framework code from the actual tests classes
separating reusable, generic test-framework code from a project specific code
QA
Dev
T e s t c l a s s e s
L o g i n M o d u l e 1 M o d u l e 2 C o m m o n
T e s t c l a s s e s
L o g i nL o g i n M o d u l e 1M o d u l e 1 M o d u l e 2M o d u l e 2 C o m m o nC o m m o n
P r o j e c t s p e c i f i c f r a m e w o r k
P a g e 1 - n P a n e 1 - n C o m m o n O t h e r . . .
P r o j e c t s p e c i f i c f r a m e w o r k
P a g e 1 - nP a g e 1 - n P a n e 1 - nP a n e 1 - n C o m m o nC o m m o n O t h e r . . .O t h e r . . .
TestFramework
UtilProjectTestcases
TestFramework
UtilUtilProjectProjectTestcasesTestcases
)
B D r i v e r H T M L
E l e m e n t s
P a g e O b j e c t s
)
B D r i v e rB D r i v e r H T M L
E l e m e n t s
H T M L
E l e m e n t s
P a g e O b j e c t sP a g e O b j e c t s
S e l e n i u m

12. Tempo Project
Tempo – a story about time
Purpose of the application
Possible user scenarios – as acceptance tests
Structure considered for testing
Demo of the Tempo project

13. Identifying the page and panes objects for testing structure – Time Tracking page
Time Tracking
Page
Time Tracking Pane
Time List Pane
Tag Pane
Live View Pane
Tempo Project

14. Diagram of tempo test project
This is where QA designs the tests.
complex functionalities covering the usage of the application;
specific user scenario or a combination of possible user actions;
validation data in one or more test classes;
data driven testing, when needed.
DEV and partly QA
Pages - Java class for each page under test with the UI elements to be
verified and all methods that are used further in the tests;
Panes – Java classes for each panes identified in the pages and the
verifying methods for each action;
Common - generic functionality executed in more pages or all pages e.g.
navigation between all pages, cleaning/ preparing the database for tests,
auto login executed before testing any page, others.
Adapting Selenium
Elements: classes for basic HTML elements such as text field, check box,
radio button, etc that encourage OO test code);
Browser Driver: browser driver utility (class) that builds an abstraction layer
for selenium RC for controlling the browser (e.g. start, stop) and for
implementing user actions methods (e.g. click, type text);
Extending the element location strategy by Injecting the entire jQuery
framework into pages under test, in order to verify visibility of elements that
appear after dynamic HTML or Ajax calls.
Tempo Project

15. Use case: Open Time Tracking page and register the time in TEMPO application (time punch,
time stamps, interval, duration). Check the results on the page.
instantiate page object TimeTrackingPage and within it we:
instantiate TimeTrackingPane – create new time stamp
instantiate TimeListPane – test that a new time stamp is listed
Instantiate TagPane – test that the new tag is loaded and displayed
Instantiate LiveViewPane – test the duration totals
Demo of the automation tests – explanation of the test class.
Tempo Project

16. Questions

17. http://seleniumhq.org/
http://patrickwilsonwelsh.com
http://www.muranosoft.com/Outsourcingblog/How-To-Use-JQuery-Instead-Of-XPath-Locators
http://code.google.com/p/learning-codebases/source/browse/trunk/selenium-rc-patterns/
http://www.slideshare.net/dampy/selenium-204802
http://www.developerit.com/en/search/selenium-rc
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1464606/selenium-rc-having-problems-with-xpath-for-a-ta
References

18. Monica Nanu
openForce Information Technology GesmbH
Dresdner Str. 108 / 3. Stock / Top 11
1200 Wien
TEL +43 1 3191775
FAX +43 1 3191775-20
www.openforce.com