In one of the first articles on the site, I talked about locators and how to use them. In that article, I talked about how XPath locators can be horrible to use, this article title aside, they most definitely can be horrible. However, use them in the right way and they can be one of…
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It’s a common misconception that when writing automated tests using Selenium, that anything that happens outside of a browser window or the scope of the application, can’t be tested and there’s no way to deal with it. This can sometimes be the case but more often than not, there will be a way to handle…
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There’s a great deal of satisfaction to be had from seeing a consistently green dashboard for your automated testing, the business think the testers are writing good, reliable tests and their software is free of issues. The trouble is, it’s not that difficult to get a tests that pass all the time if you’re not actually…
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As part of a new series of articles for the site, I’m going to post a brief article containing a random tip for improving your automation skillset, from Selenium to Powershell. In this first week, we’re going to look at taking screenshots in Selenium WebDriver tests, which can be extremely useful for providing evidence for…
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In part three, we added some core functionality to our framework in the form of window handling and dispose methods to clear up after ourselves. We also looked at adding some basic Javascript functionality to invoke scripts on our pages. So far we have the very basics of a framework, and we could if we…
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So far in our Design Pattern series, we have learnt about the Page Object Model and Facade and how they can be used within test automation. Both of which have their pros and cons, and both have situations where one is better suited than the other. In part three, we’re going to learn about another commonly…
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In part two, we created the foundation of our framework, by setting up the classes that allow us to setup and dispose of our driver instances. But we’re not going to be doing much in the way of testing by just opening an empty window and closing it. Next, we’re going to create some wrapper…
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The demand for automation skills when hiring testers has increased dramatically in the time I’ve been involved in the industry. Back when I started, it was a “nice to have” skill set that would at most be listed under the desired skills but never the list of required. Now though, it’s rare to see a…
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In part one, we built our Driver factory class that will allow us to create an instance of a browser driver, depending on the parameter we passed in. This was an important first step, as without this we would have to manually create our browser instance in our tests themselves. By doing it this way,…
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Writing code can be a hugely satisfying exercise. When you’ve finally cracked the solution to that problem you’ve been trying to solve for hours or even days, and the code just flows from your fingertips, it can leave you with a great sense of achievement and confidence. And rightly so. Unfortunately, however, the reality of…
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