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Pixel Ratio Confusion

Tip – Avoid Being on the Defensive

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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Design Pattern - Factory

Design Pattern – Facade

In the last article of this series, we learnt how to write tests using the Page Object Model design pattern. It allowed us to create a test with minimal code, keeping all the actions and element interactions in our page object class itself. This works brilliantly with web applications that have no set journey they…
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Pixel Ratio Confusion

Tip – Walk Before You Can Run

It might seem that from the title, that this is hardly a tip. In fact, with any thing in life, this saying applies. But I wanted to take a moment to talk about this in the context of test automation, because it is something that can make or break whether someone is successful in learning…
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Mistakes that make you facepalm

Mistakes – What Are You Waiting For?

Whether you write tests, write frameworks or both, one thing you are no doubt going to have to do at some point is have some kind of wait in your code. You might wonder why something so seemingly simple deserves its own article, but hopefully by the end of this, you’ll realise that waiting at…
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Selenium Locators

Selenium – Locators

When creating automated tests with Selenium, the most common thing you’ll find yourself doing over and over again is finding out your locators for the elements in which you wish to interact with. There’s no two ways about it, this is a tedious task. There are automated page scrapers that can do this for you…
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Our first JavaScript framework

Framework – Your First Framework Part 1

In the last article, we discussed the definition of a framework and expanded on it. And we tried to understand that the idea of writing your own framework isn’t quite as scary as you might think.  So today, we’re going to take the first step in to creating your first framework for testing web applications…
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Mistakes that make you facepalm

Mistakes – Being Short Sighted?

I’ve been involved in test automation for over ten years now. During that time, I’ve learnt so much from just doing the job, working with some very clever people, and the wealth of knowledge on the internet. But where I’ve learnt most has been from making mistakes, sometimes big mistakes. And to help you avoid…
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Design Pattern - Factory

Design Pattern – Page Object Model

In the first article of the this Design Pattern series, we looked at describing three of the more popular design patterns when it came to writing a framework. One of the three we learnt about was the Page Object Model design pattern. This is probably the most commonly used as it lends itself to creating…
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Does your code smell?

Best Practices – Naming Standards Part One

One of the most important parts of writing good code, be it in a test, framework or anywhere else, is that it’s readable. One way to achieve this is to make sure that you stick to good naming standards within your code. This applies to everything from variables, methods, tests and classes. Back when I…
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Selenium Locators

Selenium – Writing Your First Test

In the last article of this series, we learnt about what Selenium and WebDriver were, and how they work. With that basic understanding, we can now look at how we implement the very basics of Selenium into code, and how we go about writing our first test. For the purpose of this article, we’re going…
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