Q & A with the Selenium Committee

Have you ever wondered how Selenium works under the covers? Do you get frustrated with locators not locating, pages not loading, or browsers behaving inconsistently from one run to the next? Selenium is an attempt to unify thousands of disparate elements across a wide spectrum of challenges into a single, common interface that works seamlessly with all the major browsers - and yet only a handful of volunteers work to maintain this gigantic effort. If you would like to enhance your own Selenium experience while contributing back to the software that has defined so many of our careers, come to this workshop. In it we'll dissect the different elements of Selenium, dive into its internals, learn how it was built and how to make changes to it, and even write a unit test you can contribute on the same day!

Hike is used by 100 Million users and many of our users have cheap smart phone (~ $120 USD) that can install no more than 3 mobile apps.

So the questions is: Should testing of app be limited to its functionality? At Hike, we believe "Performance is Queen!" For our users, if we misuse the critical resources such as Battery, CPU, Network and Memory, its a deal-breaker. Hence pref-testing is very important.

During the initial days of Hike, we were very reactive and only did (manual) perf testing, when our users reported issues.

Now, every Sprint (2 weeks) and every public release (monthly), we run our automated perf tests. We measure our app's performance using several app specific use-cases on 4 key areas:

• CPU,
• Memory,
• Battery and
• Network (data consumption.)

We also benchmark the following scenarios for app latency:

• App launch time upon Force Stop
• App launch time upon Force Kill
• App's busiest screen openning time
• Scrolling latency in different parts of the app
• Contact loading time in Compose screen

We still have a long way to go in terms of our pref-testing journey at Hike. But we feel, we've some key learnings, which would be worth while to share with the community. Join us, for a fast paced perf-testing session.

We see two upcoming trends in the world of software delivery.

1.Docker is becoming a standard for managing infrastructure using containers.

2.Testing code and its infrastructure starts to grow at scale with more complexity, dependencies and technology diversity.

A container is an entire portable runtime environment: an application, plus all its dependencies, libraries and other binaries, and configuration files needed to run it, bundled into one package. By containerizing the application platform and its dependencies ,all differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure are abstracted away which makes it easy to share and execute anywhere.

At this talk we will learn how to leverage the container technology to solve the challenges of growing testing infrastructure and continuous delivery with key focus on below items.

• Basics of the containers technology and specifically it’s application on the test automation. 
• How Docker can reduce the time of test execution, ease the setup of clean test environments and drastically reduce the differences between the development, acceptance and production environments leading to the higher quality of the released software.
• Examples to containerize entire testing stack together consisting of major automation tools (selenium, appium, phantomjs), performance tools (jmeter,gatling) with cucumber. 
• Integrating and managing testing container with other application containers to achieve easily manageable continuous delivery pipeline.
• Best practices and patterns for docker success.

Today over 100 million users share over 40 billion messages per month on Hike. Its not just simple 1:1 chat messages. Users can do a VoIP call or share rich multi-media content in 8 different languages in group chats with hundreds of members. User can transfer large (upto 100 MB) file using Wifi-Direct .i.e. device to device file transfer without using Internet. And many more features. How do you ensure that you can roll out a release every month without breaking any of these features?

With such a large user based, which is very sensitive to frequent upgrades due to data consumption cost, rigorously testing the app becomes extremely critical.

When we started our automation journey in 2014, we were looking for a device lab which can simplify our testing effort. However we gave up and ended up building our own setup. The reason being, we require multiple devices that can communicate with each other for a single test. And we have 6000+ such tests, which we want to run in parallel. While many device labs allow you to run tests in parallel, they don't allow the devices to communicate with each other. Also its not possible to run the same test across multiple devices. Imagine testing a group-chat flow with photo sharing or imagine the device to device file transfer using hotspot. How would you test these features?

If this interests you, join us and we'll share our learning trying to achieve this at Hike.

One of the first things that you learn when you enter the quality assurance space is the famous triangle braked down to Unit test at the lower, on top of it Acceptance Tests based on API (in some places this layer is integration tests but the idea is the same) and at the top of the Pyramid we have the User Interface (UI) Tests. This Pyramid, in the last two decades was the main principle on how to approach testing activities (mainly automation).

In the last couple of year we are all taking part in the digital transformation that is taking place all over. Mobile Native applications as well as web applications take part in almost any activity that we are doing during the day, business are building their strategy on this channel and shifting resources and budgets to deliver applications maintained and expend their market share.

So what changed?

The users are no longer static, they are interacting with those apps while they are on the train on their way to the office, while waiting for a flight at the airport or drinking coffee while waiting for their next meeting – those “interactions” are done most of the time while they are on the go working with mobile device. In addition the application take advantage of the sensors that those devices provide in order to provide better user experience. The environment where our end users use our application has significant impact on the functionality and performance of our application which at the end of the day we call quality.

During the last year we developed a new approach for digital application testing – The “Hourglass” – This new approach expend the known Pyramid and update it to the digital era – The client side is richer and contains many components that impact the quality of application. It redefine the definition of coverage. At the top of the pyramid we add 2 additional triangles (the gives the hourglass shape) – The first one is devices – what devices should we test, how we should approach the changes that happens in the devise market. The second is the environment, the places that our end users will use and interact with the application. We leverage the automation investment and get the real digital coverage which will help to reach high quality applications.   

I know what you’re thinking: the creators of WinRunner, QTP/UFT are now embracing Selenium?

Ten years after Selenium came into existence as an open source alternative to Mercury Interactive, the perception and relationship between QTP and Selenium has morphed from competition to collaboration with complementary test automation frameworks.

Join Ori Bendet, HPE Inbound Product Manager for Functional Testing to discuss how HPE’s R&D uses Selenium and other open source tools. Understand the new roles and responsibilities of dev/test @HPE and how they fit into current team structure. Discover their lessons learned about how Selenium and open source has contributed to the success and maturity of HPE's own quality assurance and testing tools across the entire portfolio.

Building a Test Automation Framework is easy - there are so many resources / guides / blogs / etc. available to help you get started and help solve the issues you get along the journey.

Teams already building 1000s of tests of various types - UI, web service-based, integration, unit, etc. is a proof of that.

However, building a "good" Test Automation Framework is not very easy. There are a lot of principles and practices you need to use, in the right context, with a good set of skills required to make the Test Automation Framework maintainable, scalable and reusable.

In this talk, we will focus on one of the critical aspects and patterns in building the Test Automation framework - Test Data!

We will look at different data patterns as options and techniques how to create, manage, use, reuse Test Data in a way to keep the tests running in an reliable and deterministic way. We will also discuss what questions to ask, what things to think about in selecting your approach for Test Data!

This discussion will be applicable for any type of Test Automation (web / mobile / desktop), but, we will focus primarily on UI automation frameworks, ex. using Selenium.

Push Notifications are the latest way of sending updates to our users. More and more Organisations are implementing Web Push Notifications along with emails and other notification systems.

So the Big Question that arises is "How do we automate them?"

We have come up with a library in various languages which can be integrated with your Automation suite and provide you everything you need about the notification triggered.

You can easily then trigger and verify the push notification sent and ship out the product without worries :)

Data Analysis is one of the upcoming field and as many of the data scientists says that the most of time they spend for analysis is on Data cleaning, So, In this short session we will see how one can pull the data from the web using Selenium Webdriver and will use this data further for the Data Analysis, The entire exercise will be executed on a IPython Notebook, which is a tool used to execute & save your code and perform data analysis using python data analysis libraries, it also provides a platform to massage the data and visualize it in the form of graphs and tables.

This entire exercise would be helpful for anyone who wants to understand how data can be pulled with the help of Selenium Webdriver from a website and organized using python libraries for the data analysis. During this session we would be using an open source data for analysis and see how we can draw conclusions using this data.

Selenium was born for web-application testing. But have you ever thought it could be a great tool for testing Windows desktop apps too?

Today, more and more desktop apps use a web-like approach to implement their UI. The methods vary from basic HTMLayout environment to complex designs in CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework). However traditional GUI automation tools seem to be a step behind or ignoring the trend completely. This situation calls for finding new ways of testing.

In our talk we shall introduce to you a new way of utilizing Selenium for automated testing of desktop applications. No matter whether the HTML UI content is completely offline or loaded and updated dynamically, Selenium is able to access and navigate it just like in a web page. We’ll also show you how to build a small framework around it and plug it into your Continuous Integration process. All of this will be demonstrated using a real-life instance of Avast Antivirus for Windows.

Automated visual testing is a major emerging trend in the dev / test community. In this talk you will learn what visual testing is and why it should be automated. We will take a deep dive into some of the technological challenges involved with visual test automation and show how modern tools address them. We will review available Selenium-based open-source and commercial visual testing tools, demo cutting edge technologies that enable running cross browser and cross device visual tests at large scale, and show how visual test automation fits in the development / deployment lifecycle.

If you don’t know what visual testing is, if you think that Sikuli is a visual test automation tool, if you are already automating your visual tests and want to learn more on what else is out there, if you are on your way to implement Continuous Deployment or just interested in seeing how cool image processing algorithms can be, this talk is for you!

Everyone knows Selenium is primarily used for Test automation. In fact, the power of Selenium has not been fully put to use, to solve business problems in many other domains like Recruiting, Health care and literally every domain that has not yet caught up with speed of the 'Mobile & Smartphone wave'. This talk is all about how Indeed unleashed the power of Selenium to fulfill its mission to help people get jobs.

The talk has two facets to it. A part of the talk comprises of how Indeed uses Selenium differently to solve a real business problem in Recruiting Domain (that helped jobseekers send millions of job applications to 650 plus employers) followed by a technical overview of the solution.

The second part of the talk will be about Selenium Grid. We try to enlist all the functional & architectural requirements(like No Single point of failure at Hub layer, Auto-scaling, Capacity exhaustion of nodes, Monitoring unhealthy nodes, Strategy to deal with memory leak issues on Grid Nodes, Returning sessions etc.,) that a large scale Selenium Grid or Selenium Grid like setup, should ideally fulfill. We do an analysis of how SeleniumHQ’s out-of-the-box Selenium Grid offering fails to meet some of those needs and how that pushed us to design a new Selenium Grid architecture (based on RemoteWebDriver protocol). We give an technical overview of our new Selenium Grid’s Architecture, how we improved it over months. the lessons we learnt from 5M+ Sessions our Selenium Grid created, our efforts to reduce the failure rates, and the unsolved problems in our 1.5 years of journey!

We believe, our talk will be of an immense value to all Selenium Users in seeing opportunities to solve business problems in various domains using Selenium; And we hope our learnings in re-architecting Selenium Grid will be a great value to those who are planning to setup Selenium Grid in-house.

Over the last few years, Appium has become the choice automation tool for mobile application UI testing. Most people are familiar with the basics of Appium, but did you know that you Appium can identify elements using image recognition? Did you know you it's also possible to automate Windows phone and Desktop apps with Appium? Have you ever seen Appium run the same test on multiple operating systems, or seen an Appium test run using several devices at once?

The talk will cover advanced Appium topics such as these along with best practices to ensure you get the most out of Appium.

Selenium Grid can be a bit daunting to get up and running. Starting it is quite easy, but using it effectively requires pulling in third party tools. In this workshop we’ll cover how you would realistically run your grid, using modern tooling to run a grid with docker containers or in a cloud service like AWS or theoretically your own VM provisioning environment.

With increasing cyber threats & online attacks, an unavoidable situation for continuous security testing has emerged. Making sure all vulnerabilities are unleashed regularly is highly significant.

The paper hence proposes a solution where automated security testing could be achieved in conjunction with functional testing carried out using selenium API.

It introduces a framework that caters to automated security testing along with functional which could provide an integrated testing elucidation.

The paper, takes in these two premises to offer a solution where functional automation testers can now take on security testing. I propose a framework where automated security testing could be achieved in conjunction with functional testing using existing selenium API scripts.

The framework covers the top vulnerabilities and provides intuitive results that help a non-security tester interpret and act on the output. At the very core of this framework is the open source tool, OWASP ZAP, which is easy to use and integrates well with Selenium automation frameworks.

I bring in hands on project experience having implemented this framework for clients, who have been able to get the value of functional and security testing using the same set of scripts – it is this experience I would like to share with the SeleniumConf2016 audience, to help groom functional testers into security testing, with minimal cost and time, also enabling security testing to be performed every time functional automation is taken up.

In this workshop you will learn how to start from nothing and build out a well factored, maintainable, resilient, fast and scalable set of Selenium tests in Java. These tests will not only work well, but across all of the browsers you care about, while exercising relevant functionality that matters to your business. And if you are new to programming, don't sweat it. The core programming concepts you need to know will be covered in an approachable way as well. 

How does it usually look when people do Mobile Web Test Automation? They write a couple of tests, run them on some desktop browser and only after that try to run on emulators/simulators and the final step is adapting and fixing the tests for browsers on real devices.

By happy chance we developed our tests for Mobile Web on real devices. But some time ago we decided to run on Desktop as well.

Why? What benefits did we get? How do we have both Appium and Selenium tests in one repository? And what challenges did we face? About this and many other things I will tell in my talk.

In this talk I would like to share good practices of BDD , Cucumber Tool and its usage with Selenium with Serenity framework , Appium and API Testing.

I will be sharing how I had implemented BDD culture in team , which was following Agile ( fast waterfall ) , how it has helped business.

There are many who know Selenium and are experts in it. But with BDD and Cucumber , it can be used much more efficiently.

The main benefits of this methodology will be reducing bugs , re-work , tech debt , bad customer reviews , cost and increases overall productiveness and happiness across orgnisation

With all these , QA can be assistant cook along with main cook ( who is developer and/or product ) and elevate from traditional waiter role , where some code is thrown at him to deliver to somebody who pays for it.