If you are a seasoned professional, you must be familiar with Selenium testing. But, if you are a newcomer then you must be wondering: What is it? Don’t worry! We will help you out! With this article, we will understand the major practices that will help you to ensure the reliability of Selenium test results.
Selenium, a powerful and widely used automation test suite, holds the crown for being the most popular in the segment of automated web testing. However, depending on your testing configurations or test machines, the test results might change or even become inaccurate. So, it becomes very important to take all the required measures to ensure the reliability of the test results.
Introducing Selenium
Before we start discussing the best practices related to Selenium testing, let us take a step back and understand the basics of Selenium. In layman’s language, it is a suite of tools to automate your browser interactions. Selenium provides flexibility to test web apps on different browsers and platforms.
The Selenium test suite consists of the following components that help execute various actions during web automation testing:
- The Selenium Grid is the backbone of the entire suite as it will help you to initiate and execute the test cases. By analyzing the test parameters, WebDriver will also help you initiate the test suite in the native browser environment without any third-party test engine.
- The Selenium Integrated Development Environment is available as a Firefox and Chrome extension. Using this tool, you can implement the record and playback feature on these browsers to implement codeless automation testing for creating basic automation test scripts.
- Finally, the Selenium Grid will help you to run your automation test scripts on multiple machines and browsers at the same time. It is a pivotal tool for initiating parallel testing on modern web apps.
How to Set Up A Robust Test Environment
As testers, we must remember that the test environment must be reliable as it is the foundation of adaptive Selenium testing. To improve our knowledge about setting up the test environment with Selenium, let us go through some of the most important factors in this segment:
- The testers must deploy version control systems like Git for managing their test scripts, track changes, return to old versions if necessary, and collaborate with various team members during the test execution process.
- It is also important to isolate the test environment to ensure that any potential error in a specific test script does not hamper the functioning of other test cases. You can implement this process by using staging environments and Docker files.
- Staging environments are such test environments which mirror the production process. This approach will help you find errors that might not be clearly visible in a local or development setup.
- You can also use Docker files to create consistent and isolated test environments as per the requirements of your testing projects.
- To manage the dependency of your test cases, you can use Java projects like Maven. Maven will also help you build different test configurations. On the other hand, if you’re using Python projects you can use pip or virtualenv for this process.
Writing Maintainable And Reusable Test Scripts
It is very important to remember that implementing maintainability and reusability are very important to ensure the long-term success while executing Selenium automation testing. To achieve this goal, you can follow and incorporate the following practices:
- Use of Page Object Models
- The Page Object Model is a design pattern which will help you to separate test scripts from the code that you will use to interact with web elements. The primary motive of this separation is to improve the readability and maintainability of your test scripts.
- You can also create reusable page objects which will represent the web pages or the individual components present on these pages. Using this approach, you can reduce code duplication and also enhance the maintainability of the entire test suite. To implement this process, you simply have to enter the following code snippet in the terminal window of Selenium:
- Modularizing Test Code
- The first step towards creating modernized test code is implementing helper functions. These helper functions will help you execute the repetitive tasks, including logging in or navigating to a specific page.
- You can also use external files like JSON or CSV to manage the test data. This implementation will help you to efficiently separate the test logic from data, which will, in turn, make it easier to update.
- By modernizing the test code, you can also ensure that the test script remains scalable and you can consistently roll out the future updates to the application infrastructure. It’ll also help you to have the peace of mind that new elements aren’t negatively impacting the functioning of the existing web elements.
Ensuring The Stability Of Selenium Testing
As testers, we must remember that unstable tests can generate false positives and false negatives in test reports. So, to improve the reliability of the test results, you must implement the following strategies to ensure the test stability:
- The first step begins with the implementation of efficient waiting methods like implicit and explicit waits. Implicit waits will help you to set a global wait time for all elements to be present before the system finally throws out an exception.
- On the other hand, explicit waits will help you to pause the test execution process for a specific condition to be met. After this condition has been met, the system will automatically proceed towards the next phase of the test execution process. The following code will help you implement explicit waits in Selenium testing.
- It is also important for the testers to implement efficient retry mechanisms to retry the failed flaky test cases. Multiple tools can assist you in this process. For the sake of understanding, if you’re using Java-based automation test scripts, you can use TestNG and on the other hand, you can use pytest-rerunfailures for Python-based test scripts.
Executing Cross-Browser Testing
Cross-browser testing helps you to test websites in different browsers. You can also integrate automation testing with cross-browser testing using cloud-based platforms like LambdaTest.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automated testing at scale with over 3000 real devices, browsers, and OS combinations. With this platform, you can also integrate parallel testing to run these test cases on multiple test configurations side by side.
It also has other advanced features like generating comprehensive test reports after test execution along with native test activity logging. To further shed more light over this segment, we have given a sample test case that will help you execute automated cross-browser testing with Selenium and LambdaTest:
Handling Dynamic Content And Asynchronous Operations
Modern web applications massively rely on dynamic elements and asynchronous operations to improve the end-user experience. These elements can change their structure, functioning, and interactions based on user, device, or other factors. However, all these advanced features can make it challenging to verify the functioning of these features.
- For dynamic elements, you can use robust locators, which are less likely to break with changes in the user interface. We also recommend the testers to prefer CSS Selectors or XPath expressions. This is because these expressions rely on stable attributes and do not vary depending on the changing features of the elements.
- On the other hand, while working with asynchronous operations, you must use explicit waits to synchronize the test cases with the app’s current state. You should also wait for the elements to become clickable, visible, or for the AJAX calls to complete.
Using Continuous Integrations
Testers can use continuous integrations to automate the execution of their test suite as part of the development workflow. Continuous integration is a very important component of the modern agile development workflow. It prioritizes the simultaneous execution of development and testing processes. To implement this process, you must incorporate the following parameters within the testing cycle:
- The first thing is the inclusion of a continuous integration tool like Jenkins or GitHub actions. These will allow you to seamlessly integrate your test flows with your data repositories.
- After this formula, you have to divert your focus towards scheduled runs so that you can run the tests as per their pre-defined structure or as a response to code changes. Using this approach, you can ensure that the app’s core architecture is continuously tested.
Utilizing The Advanced Browser Features
Selenium also has various advanced features which can help you to enhance your testing capabilities while improving the accuracy of your final test results. To shed more light over this segment, we have mentioned some of the most important additions to this list:
- The first thing is the ability to run your test cases in a headless mode to speed up the test execution process. For a basic introduction, a headless browser instance is such a browser configuration which does not initiate its graphical user interface. It not only reduces the strain on your system but also boosts the testing speed. By entering the following code in the Selenium terminal window, you can initiate this process:
- You can also consider using custom browser profiles for testing specific scenarios. A great example is that you can create a dedicated browser instance for different user settings or pre-installed interactions. You can also use this feature for verifying the functioning of various user interactions.
- We strongly advise the testers to use RemoteWebDriver for executing the tests on remote machines or cloud services. Selenium helps the testers to easily initiate a RemoteWebDriver depending on the test requirements. We have also provided a sample code snippet that uses RemoteWebDriver for a Java-based automation test script.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the arguments that we put forward in this article, we can safely conclude that by following the above best practices, you can improve the reliability and effectiveness of your Selenium testing suite. Moreover, by incorporating these practices within your testing flow, you will catch major issues at the earlier phases. This will reduce maintenance efforts and also ensure a high-end user experience.
Finally, we would like to conclude on the note that automation testing is a continuous process of improvement. So, you have to constantly review and update your test strategies to incorporate all the new challenges and technological advancements. By creating a strong foundation and a commitment to best practices, Selenium will be your best friend in this journey.