Selenium Implementation – A conceptual Overview
Selenium is one of the most trending tools currently in the market for automated cross browser testing of web applications. There is no specific guideline for implementing Selenium, however, there are several methodologies that can be followed to successfully leverage the features of Selenium.
Evaluate the Standards of the Organization:
For implementing a new software practice in an organization, the new software tool needs to be tested in terms economic and technical feasibility for the organization.
Before implementing Selenium, its pros and cons should be well evaluated against the organization’s requirements.
Selenium is only used to test web applications. The entire coverage provided by Selenium testing should be documented and well communicated to the team who will be using it.
Selenium supports a large set of popular programming languages. However, if the implementation team uses a programming language that is not supported by Selenium, they will experience difficulties in the transition.
Implementing a Framework
The most naive way to use Selenium is to code a script for each test. This may seem as a very potential way of achieving full test coverage. But this same methodology may lead to future standstills due to a number of reasons. Tests should stable, consistent, easily understandable and that which can be changed easily. This requires a framework to be in place. While implementing a framework can be time consuming, it will pay off enormously in the future.
Code Standardization
Conforming to an existing naming and documentation convention is an important aspect of any automation process. It is equally important to develop codes that can be reused. It can be a constructive initiative to train the automation developers on the fundamentals of software development techniques.
Externalization of the Configuration
The most common failure in software automation is when a new software build is released, the already developed automation scripts fail to test them successfully. To avoid such inconsistencies, the automated tests should be consistent and adaptable.
This can be achieved in the following ways:
- Making the automation self-aware by anticipating dynamic functionalities and accommodating them whenever possible.
- Configurable values should be exposed whenever possible. A majority of the maintenance issues is caused by tweaking object identification. This is because Selenium provides no object identification strategy at all.
- The naming conventions and the other coding standards should be strictly followed. A failure to adhere to these conventions may lead to hours of debugging efforts.
- Hard coding can seem easy and is mainly practiced by the ignorant or novice programmers. Specifying fixed values which are potentially configurable in the future, call for changes in the code for maintenance in the future.
Logging and Reporting
Logs and reports help to determine the pass or failure of tests, determine test coverage, debug test scripts, collect the debug report and access screen captures as well. Selenium lacks in logging and reporting. Without results and reports, test automation is of no use.
While implementing these features, the best approach is to separate the concept of logging and reporting. Logging should be reserved for technical details while reports serve better as HTML or other portable readable format. Reports should also contain the execution details of the test cases and the environment in which they were run.
The client will always ask for the test report and it should be ensured that the test automation serves its purpose for which it was implemented in the first place.
Conclusion:
Which part of the application needs to be tested, the user expectations, project timeline, priorities determined by the project managers are contributing factors in determining the implementation practices. Thus, the best implementation practices for Selenium may be different for different projects and requires careful consideration of all the aspects.
