If a test fails in the woods and no one is there to see it does anyone care, does anyone even notice. What happens when failing tests become the norm and you can't see the wood from the trees? 

After watching last years Allure Report presentation I was inspired.  Selenium tests (and automation tests in general) are often poorly understood by the team as a whole.  Reports/emails go unread with tests failing becoming an expected outcome rather than a glaring red flag.  We looked at what Allure brought to the table and from that base created a dashboard which was designed to:

• Display the results of test runs in a way that was useful to managers, testers and the rest of the development team.  Including tools to filter out specific test runs and view the overall trend of the test run results.
• Make debugging tests easier by grouping errors, displaying history of test results, filtering tests and offering visual comparison of test runs.
• Help mitigate the problems flaky tests cause with test run result reporting (say that three times fast).
• Help with our mobile device certification process, by easily providing a view to compare test runs across devices.

Since it's creation the dashboard has been used and praised by managers through to developers.  With our full suite of tests from unit to integration to selenium and appium being stored on the dashboard.  We've managed to:

• Decrease the time taken to debug test cases.
• Increase the visibility of all our test suites, with managers having a better idea of how our selenium test suite is progressing and testers better understanding the coverage of unit tests.
• Focus the organization on quality.

We are working with legal at present to have this project open sourced and available to all prior to Selenium Conf 2015.

WebDriver API is designed to be abstract enough. That is why it usually needs exdending when it comes to using Selenium in practice. If using API out of the box it leads to code duplicates and finding solutions for similar goals every time since it privides only basic classes such as WebDriver or WebElement. Webium library helps you to extend Web Driver API to whatever deep UI object structure you need. You can describe basic UI elements (e.g. Link, Button, Input), construct more complex elements from smaller parts and eventually put them all into your Page Objects. Webium is free and open-source. In my talk I'll explain how to use it efficiently in case you use or are going to use Python + Selenium for writing tests.

How many times do we test the same things at multiple layers, multiple levels, adding time to the build process and testing cycle, delaying the feedback?

We know what to test and how to test, but what is the right place to test it?

In this workshop, we will demonstrate how as QA’s we can identify what tests can be classified as unit tests, integration test and functional test. Using a case study, we will see how each component can be tested as part of unit testing; the integration of different parts and the functioning of a software system as a whole and how functional tests fit into this big picture. We will then bring all these tests together to understand and build the testing pyramid and how it enables us to build the right testing framework with fewer selenium i.e functional tests.

Speed of UI automation has always been an issue when it comes to Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery. If UI automation suite takes 3 hours to complete, then any commit happens during this time will not be visible in test environment, because the next deployment will happen only after 3 hours. 

With 2000+ developers and average 250+ checkins per day, the above issues is replicated 250+ times every day. This is not productive and feedback cycle is super slow!

Another issue is , with 35+ different project teams using 10 or more different jenkins jobs to run their UI automation. So many jobs means (350+), individual teams need to go through the pain of managing their own jenkins job, its a duplicate effort and waste of time. Automation teams need to spend time on writing reliable automation and not managing jenkins jobs.

Solution is to reduce the UI automation run time from hours to minutes and also use only handful of jobs to run the Distributed Automation!

Goal: To run all UI automation scenarios within the time take by the longest test case

Traditional approach in performance testing does not include client side processing time (i.e. DOM Content Load, Page Render, JavaScript Execution, etc.) as part of response times, performance tests has always been conducted to stress the server so tools like Jmeter have been very popular to execute tests. With increasing complexity of architectures (Web, Browser, Mobile) on the client side it has been important to understand the real user experience.   Commercial tools have started to provide features that can provide insights into real user experience after the bytes are transferred to the client end.  With the ability to call Selenium scripts via Jmeter the ability to conduct real user experience tests using open source stack has opened up new avenues to comment on real user experience.   This enables us to comment on

• Provides Page load times similar to On Load time of real browsers
• Generates HAR file with following statistics
• Details of summary of request times and content types
• Waterfall chart with page download time breakdown statistics such as  DNS resolution time, Connection time, SSL handshaking time, Request send time, wait time and receive time.

By integrating the open source stack tools it enables us to provide the same insights which a commercial of the shelf tools would offer.   At Gallop we have implemented this at multiple clients providing them insights into various bottlenecks at the client side which helped us to provide greater value proposition

A big blocker for putting a website on truly continuous production delivery is the amount of time it take to validate that the site works correctly.  Tests themselves take time to run, and test results are unreliable to the point where it takes a human to investigate and interpret them.  When counting the time that it takes to both run and interpret results, test runs for an enterprise web site can take an entire day from inception to useful result.

This session describes common points of failure in test execution that add both latency and unreliability and what can be done to overcome them while still preserving the value of UI validation.  We'll discuss why, after addressing these concerns, UI can be unblocked to reliably field thousands of validation scenarios on a local machine in a matter of minutes. 

Manual Testing.  Depending on how you've been influenced by those two simple words, reactions vary from slight disgust to full-on depression.  Of course, the solution is clear: automate, but how do you get there when your company is continually pushing out the next big feature?  As the set of features to cover increases, the lack of scalability of manual testing becomes more apparent.

This is a problem that we struggled with at our company.  Automation tactics were explored and implemented, but problems persisted as proposed solutions did not cater to the demands of the manual testers.

After years of failure and disappointment, our latest stint resulted in success.  Not only do we have hundreds of automated tests across various platforms (mobile and web) and products, but manual testing has been eliminated with zero casualties.  As we move forward towards Continuous Delivery and improved automation performance, we wanted to take this moment to look back and share stories of failure and success.

Every language and framework which lives as long as Selenium has its fuckups.. and we're here to embrance them and joke about them.

E.g. JS Wat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqhZZNUyVFM

Visual Test Automation using Selenium

Visual Testing is the method of verifying that the application’s GUI appears correctly to its users. Most of the people say visual testing is hard to automate. Given the number of web browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, responsive design, internationalization, etc.) the nature of visual testing can be complex. But with existing open source and commercial solutions, this complexity is manageable, making it easier to automate than it once was, since verification with traditional automated functional testing tools can be very challenging.

It can be easily achieved by integrating Selenium with Applitools. This talk mainly focuses on verifying the application’s graphical user interfaces (GUI) and finding the visual bugs using Applitools. It is very helpful for all sites having graphical functionalities like (charts, graph, dashboards etc).  Verify that the GUI appears correctly across all devices & browsers. The nature of visual testing can be complex. But with existing open source and commercial solutions, this complexity is manageable, making it easier to automate than it once was. And the payoff is well worth the effort.

Take pressure off manual QA: increase coverage, test faster & more accurately.  Reduce maintenance efforts: automatically propagate changes across execution environments. Release faster, with confidence & flawless.

Applitools Eyes Express captures the screen you want to test, and compares it to a baseline image – instantly, with a single click. No extra testing code necessary, no boring error logs.

For example, a single automated visual test will look at a page and assert that every element on it has rendered correctly. Effectively checking hundreds of things and telling you if any of them are out of place. This will occur every time the test is run, and it can be scaled to each browser, operating system, and screen resolution you care about.

Put another way, one automated visual test is worth hundreds of assertions. And if done in the service of an iterative development workflow, then you’re one giant leap closer.

Each of these tools follows some variation of the following work flow:

1. Drive the application under test (AUT) and take a screenshot
2. Compare the screenshot with an initial “baseline” image
3. Report the differences
4. Update the baseline as needed

Comprehensive functional testing is a widely accepted best practice and Selenium is the prevalent tool of choice. But long-running Selenium test suites cannot be fit into short continuous integration (CI) cycles and are often run once a night or less. Running functional tests less frequently means bugs are discovered later than they should. Tanay Nagjee will discuss how Selenium test suites can be parallelized at a very fine granularity and included in CI builds. By leveraging a cluster of compute horsepower (on-premise and/or cloud), large Selenium suites can execute in a fraction of the time by smartly parallelizing the individual tests and running them on individual *cores* (not hosts). Tanay will outline the approach and tools to achieve these results with Selenium, and will present a live demonstration.

Element Locator strategies for Selenium WebDriver are highly flexible, and have been later inherited by many commercial tools. Although the locator strategies are flexible, they are also limited in a sense that, Selenium WebDriver does not currently allow its users to identify/filter UI elements with multiple locator strategies(at a time), as many commercial tools do.

The solution discussed in this article describes a library that allows Selenium WebDriver users to extend the Selenium element locator strategies for Element Filtering and few use cases for the library.

The solution approach allows users to continue to use the existing UI Element definitions in their tests, and extend them, using the By reference. The library will replace the existing Selenium WebDriver “By” reference.

Filtering based on multiple locator strategies

There are various scenarios where to uniquely identify an UI element, a complex XPath has to be written. However, the element can be identified uniquely using multiple locator strategies for the UI Element. The UI Elements can also be filtered, when there are multiple matches in a page. This is the UI Element recognition mechanism used in many commercial test automation tools.

The algorithm for filtering UI Elements based on multiple locator strategies is based on priority of locator strategies. The priority of locator strategies when filtering is:

1. ID
2. Name
3. TagName
4. ClassName
5. XPATH
6. LinkText and PartialLinkText
7. CSS

The By.elementFilter method takes multiple locator strategies, and searches the page for elements matching a particular locator strategy/property, and checks if it is a unique match on the page, if not then it uses the next locator strategy passed to it and so on.

This method is also very helpful when the application undergoes constant changes and UI Elements might have either of XPATH, ID , NAME, TagName, ClassName etc still unchanged. That way, it helps reduce a lot of maintenance effort in Selenium WebDriver implementations which is due to UI element changes.

Filtering based on Index

When there are multiple similar UI Elements in a page, such as cells in a grid/table, it makes sense to identify objects based on their Index based on their appearance on the web page.

The By.indexFilter method allows users to define an UI Element based on its Index of occurrence of the UI Element. The Index starts from 1.

Filtering based on relative element

When a UI element cannot be identified uniquely and reliably by any of its properties, but has some elements in its hierarchy or relative to a particular element, this method can be used to identify the element

The By.relationFilter method allows users to define an UI Element in relation to another element. The relation can be defined as “Left”, ”Right”, ”Top”, ”Bottom”, ”Child”, ”Parent”

Filtering for Tables

When dealing specifically with Tables, which have the

html tag, the By.tableFilter method allows the user to quickly identify specific cells in the table, without having to write complex XPaths or logics to achieve the same.

The By.tableFilter method allows users to define a cell in the table with Row,Column numbers. This allows users to directly use the UI Element in their code instead of writing their logic each time. This also increases efficiency and readability of the code.