Book Image

Selenium Framework Design in Data-Driven Testing

By : Carl Cocchiaro
Book Image

Selenium Framework Design in Data-Driven Testing

By: Carl Cocchiaro

Overview of this book

The Selenium WebDriver 3.x Technology is an open source API available to test both Browser and Mobile applications. It is completely platform independent in that tests built for one browser or mobile device, will also work on all other browsers and mobile devices. Selenium supports all major development languages which allow it to be tied directly into the technology used to develop the applications. This guide will provide a step-by-step approach to designing and building a data-driven test framework using Selenium WebDriver, Java, and TestNG. The book starts off by introducing users to the Selenium Page Object Design Patterns and D.R.Y Approaches to Software Development. In doing so, it covers designing and building a Selenium WebDriver framework that supports both Browser and Mobile Devices. It will lead the user through a journey of architecting their own framework with a scalable driver class, Java utility classes, JSON Data Provider, Data-Driven Test Classes, and support for third party tools and plugins. Users will learn how to design and build a Selenium Grid from scratch to allow the framework to scale and support different browsers, mobile devices, versions, and platforms, and how they can leverage third party grids in the Cloud like SauceLabs. Other topics covered include designing abstract base and sub-classes, inheritance, dual-driver support, parallel testing, testing multi-branded applications, best practices for using locators, and data encapsulation. Finally, you will be presented with a sample fully-functional framework to get them up and running with the Selenium WebDriver for browser testing. By the end of the book, you will be able to design your own automation testing framework and perform data-driven testing with Selenium WebDriver.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface

Inspecting page elements on browser applications


For browser applications, there are various tools that can be used for each browser type; Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, Opera, and so on. In this section, we will discuss the Inspector tool that is built into each browser.

Types of locators

Each of these browsers has, at the very least, a developer's tool called Inspector, which allows users to look at the HTML/JavaScript code in the DOM, to view elements as they exist on the page. Depending on how the developers build the pages, there may be several unique identifiers that can be used, or there may be none.

In general, and as common as it may seem, using a unique ID is always the best practice for identifying an element. In cases where the UI is just getting built or being refactored, developers can add the IDs to each element as a standard practice, which makes testing of the web or mobile pages extremely easy. Of course, using a unique class, name, tag, or text attribute is also sufficient...