I add a new category in the admin panel and want to ensure that the category is available in the dropdown on the user's part of the website. Recorded test in the Selenium IDE works fine. But the thing is, the task that I execute is of course not a pure frontend thing - the category is saved in the database and is loaded from it to show it to the user. So if something goes wrong on the database-side, the test will fail.
My question is: is it bad practice to do such tests that depend on backend-behavior ? Should I go for Selenium Webdriver ?
If you use Selenium Webdriver, your test will not change in a main thing. It still will check database side. Selenium Webdriver is just anouther tool for testing that is more flexible and allows to make more complex test then in Selenium IDE.
I don't think that it is bad practice, because it is just one of the tests that chould be executed to enshure you that this part of your project works correctly. In this case I would check back-end part(get all categories from DB or admin's panel and check that there is no extra or missing ones) and than check user's panel(all categories are the same as set in DB and admin's panel).
Related
There is a project where we are going to automate the UI but the Automation team is suggesting that we have to use ID's all over the page so that it will be easy to automate there script.
My Question here is why we will use ID's everywhere ? hampering the Html and Css structure.
The webpage can be automated without ID's in html yes or no ?
Yes, a web page can be automated without ID's. For example, you can play with cssSelectors here https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/trysel.asp (note that example page has elements with and without ids)
Using ids for element's lookup in automation is generally considered as a best practice. If you use ids your automation tests will become independent of html structures which basically will make them more stable.
For example, in the first version of your app you may have some text implemented as
<p id="someTextId" class="someClass">Hello world</p>
but at some point may decide to rewrite it as (change the tag and even apply different class name)
<div id="someTextId" class="anotherClass">Hello world</div>
In case you rely on id #someTextId to locate an element your test will still be able to access necessary element and interact with it properly. If you use p or .someClass your automation test will fail to find an element even though from the ui perspective the same text will be displayed in a browser.
We faced several downsides of using id:
Some frameworks do not recommend using them or generate them automatically. (Potential issues with ids described here https://www.javascriptstuff.com/use-refs-not-ids/, https://www.quora.com/Are-IDs-a-big-no-no-in-the-CSS-world, https://dev.to/claireparker/reasons-not-to-use-ids-in-css-4ni4, https://www.creativebloq.com/css3/avoid-css-mistakes-10135080, https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/3ge2ma/why_some_people_dont_use_ids_at_all/)
Some other logic may rely on them, so changing/adding them for the need of automation may somehow affect other app logic unexpectedly.
What you can use instead of id is some other attribute. For example in our projects, we have switched from id to a specific attribute named dataSeleniumId. It clearly shows that the attribute is selenium tests usage only. As a next step, you can add a rule in your team when someone changes or removed dataSeleniumId attribute he should inform automation testing team about it. As changing/removing this attribute will lead to test failures and to avoid any false failures it is better to fix it in advance.
For an automation developer its much easier to browse trough the html code and see the id of specific button/text field/etc.. to implement the relevant locator inside the automated test.
In most cases, the project start to receive duplication of classes or complicated nested elements. This make the life of automation dev harder, because of writing xpath or css selectors, verify that they work and this locator finds only 1 unique element.
Its up to the team and code style suggested from the team leader.
Back on the question, yes the website can be written without id's but if the goals is to automate large part of the website, id's would be great helper to the automation dev team.
I am quite new to the Selenium. I tried to search for similar questions/issues, but did not find.
I need to create Test Case in Selenium IDE. Test case goes to a web page https://demo.centreon.com. It logs nicely in. But then I want the Selenium to check that the Down hosts count is for example 0.
The code when checking the elements is:
How should I configure it to Selenium IDE to show me error when the count is something else than 0?
In selenium you're going to want to utilize an assert. For your example it might be best select the URL and to assert the final URL e.g. main.php?p=20202&o=down&search=0 or whatever your case might be. More on that here: http://www.seleniumhq.org/docs/02_selenium_ide.jsp#assertion-or-verification
The downside is that using Selenium IDE can be limiting and eventually you're going to want to use a language binding e.g. python, java, ruby, etc. try using Selenium IDE to export the test in a language and experiment.
Suppose I have a web page with several links on it. Also it has few buttons which execute some JavaScript.
So should I create one Java class for testing each of these links and elements or should I test all the links in just one test method and other elements in another one(so ending up with two Scripts).
Is there a another way of gouping these tests.
Thank you.
I have found that writing test cases based on actions is much more useful than writing based on pages.
Obviously, we would love to have everything automated. But realistically, this isn't possible. So we test what is most important...which happens to be: 1. The primary purposes of the product you are testing, and 2. The security of the product.
To make this easier to understand, lets say I have a Checkout page.
If I were to test based on a page, I would make sure every link on the page would work. I would verify that I can type in a new number in the quantity field, and make sure that the page verifies that the credit card number I type in is correct.
This method would somewhat test Security, but beyond that, it would test the UI. What would happen if I clicked on the Checkout button, and I was sent to the right page, but the item I was trying to checkout disappeared? That is a huge problem, but the test based on the page would work.
However, if I were to test based on actions (go to this page, add to cart, type in personal information, and then checkout), now I have made sure that the most important part of your program works, checked security, and even a little UI testing.
All in all, write your testing to do what the average user would do. No normal person is going to sit on the same page, testing out every little feature on that page.
It depends on whether you like to see 1/1 tests passed or 2/2 tests passed.
How do I know what should be a test case and what a test suite in Selenium?
Is there any general rule for it? I've read the seleniumhq site any several others, but
they only have some basic examples while I want to test a whole website.
My questions are for example:
Say I'm testing some multi-step web form. Should I make it one test suite and each
step (in web form) would be a single test case or all steps should be one test case?
Say I've built a web forum and I want to test several features in it. Do I make one
test suite and each test case tests each feature (or several cases per each feature) OR
I'll have many test suites and each suite tests one feature with a few test cases.
What to do if I have a form which contains 5 checkboxes - each of them can be obviously clicked
or not. This may have some consequences when I submit the form. So - theoretically there are 2^5=32
possible execution flows. Should I test all 32? Or maybe should I just test each checkbox separately
to simplify things. When can/should I simplify, when not? (assuming that checkboxes MAY be
somehow related).
Should each feature have test cases which test both positive and negative results?
For example should I just focus on correct workflows - i.e. submit valid form and see if the
website did what I asked for (worked) OR also submit empty form and check if error message
appeared.
Can you answer these giving some practical examples (if needed)? - maybe using some (StackOverflow?)
site as example site.
Answer to 1 and 2:
I think this is more an issue about test design than selenium. Consider Selenium as a tool which controls the browser/website like a user would do. It simulates a user clicking through the page. To know what a test case is and what a test suite is you should think of the functionalities of your web application you want to test. Let's say you have web shop than one test case could test the following use case:
user puts articles in cart
user enters his data (name etc)
user gets a summary of his order
user confirms the order
It depends on your application which workflows or functionality you want to test.
I would consider a test suite for a whole project so one suite for one web application. And this application has a lot of test cases. Every test case is a use case.
When building a test suite, consider some design patterns like ui-mapping, page object design and consider the advantages of a test management system (like TestNG in Java).
here are some links to that:
http://www.shino.de/2011/07/26/on-the-pageobject-pattern/
http://www.theautomatedtester.co.uk/tutorials/selenium/page-object-pattern.htm
http://www.cheezyworld.com/2010/11/09/ui-tests-not-brittle/
http://hedleyproctor.com/2011/07/automating-selenium-testing-with-testng-ant-and-cruisecontrol/
Answer to 3 and 4:
It is similar to 1 and 2. It is always a question WHAT you want to test. Or a question what your project leader wants you to test (or customer). Every functionality which is important and should work should be tested.
I have been using Selenium in my DEV environment. When I go to try some of my recorded tests on my Test environment, I find that the elements have different IDs (they are generated by the web framework). I can change the test manually to use
document.forms[2].elements[3]
instead of by id, which looks like this:
ellaMform:j_id77
I'm looking for a way to tell selenium to record the dom:index value for the controls so that tests will be the same between DEV and TEST.
Similar question on SO points to a plugin but is not exactly what I need:
Make Selenium record IDs, not paths
IDE already has locator builders for several DOM styles (e.g., dom:index, which matches your model, or dom:name, which is less position-oriented). By default, they are prioritized lower than ID locators, but you can choose which locator you want to use when you record the test.