Q & A with the Selenium Committee

Selenium: State of the Union

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.

This small talk is about the intricate fabric of discussion between an interviewer and an interviewee for the post of Automation Engineer.

The audience would be taken through a maze of silly, run of the mill, subjective, bizarre and occasionally brilliant questions/answers/discussions found in an average interview for Automation Engineer/Selenium Engineer. 

We'll try to look at the 4 quadrants of the Selenium Interview circle, covering it from the perspectives of :

1. The Interviewer
2. The Interviewee
3. Current Industry state
4. How can we improve?

This might seem like a soft, non-technical, not-so-important topic of discussion but we must remember that bad interviews lead to bad candidates lead to bad deliverables. As they say, For want of a nail the battle was lost. 

And in today's cut-throat world none of us can afford losing a good candidate to a bad interview.

Lets gather around a fire of questions, on the beach of answers to surgically comprehend the What, How and Why of Selenium Interviews.

These days we find most of the apps are being developed across different platform, iOS, android, windows and to keep the user base which uses web, mobile web and websites. 

When apps are being developed for cross domains, most of the functionality provided by the app is very similar, varying thing is PLATFORM. 

 In rapid development cycle, where there are tools which allows you to write once and reuse across multiple platforms, makes development very faster. 
But at the same time, if we have different automation suite for different platforms, it becomes very difficult to keep a pace with ongoing functionality. 
This is the exact problem we faced, and the solution we came up with is "One Page to test them all! -A cross platform mobile automation framework! "

Page Object Model

Well, Page Object Model was again a natural fit for this framework. Most implementations of POM recommend different POMs for each platform. But we wanted to have a single Page Object Model for all the 3 platforms to ensure maximum code reuse and reduce overall time spent in adding new automation.
 

Single Page Object Model across platforms

This was complicated because we had native screens as well as webview screens and so it was not possible to use the same Page Object. To solve this, we introduced abstractions for the elements on the screen and encapsulated the respective native driver implementations.

This also allowed us to implement common automation tasks in one place for e.g waiting for new pages to load, so that this code is not repeated across multiple step definitions and platforms. This helped us move to thinking in higher domain level concepts than in terms of low level UI interactions.

So, in summary, we write our tests for one platform and run them for all with an abstraction layer in place.

Analytics are an increasingly important capability of any large web site or application. When a user selects an option or clicks a button, dozens—if not hundreds—of behavior-defining “beacons” fire off into a black box of “big data” to be correlated with the usage patterns of thousands of other users. In the end, all these little data points form a constellation of information your organization will use to determine its course. But what if it doesn’t work? A misconfigured site option or an errant variable might seem insignificant, but if 10,000 users are firing 10,000 incorrect values concerning their click patterns, it suddenly becomes a problem for the QA department―a department which is often left out of conversations involving analytics.

Join Marcus Merrell to learn how analytics work, how to get involved early, and how to integrate analytics testing into the normal QA process, using Selenium and other open source tools, to prevent those misfires from slipping through.

Marathon is a open source test automation suite for Java Swing and Java/FX applications. Marathon provides Selenium/WebDriver bindings for executing test scripts agains Java application.

In this workshop we explore steps by which you can set up an environment for testing a Java/Swing application.

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.

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 :)

Often it is observed that new-comers jumping to Selenium have mastered the API but are stuck up with Object Identification. It becomes very essential that test automation engineers identify robust mechanisms to identify objects and make their scripts less fragile. This talk/tutorial deals with writing optimized Object locators and having best practices in identifying them.

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.

This workshop will feature getting started with automating Android & iOS native apps and Mobile web using Appium with java.

We will learn :

    - how to capture elements for all these 3 categories (Mobile Web, android, iOS)

    - how to create tests

    - how to give them a form of framework to have reporting/screenshots etc. benefits

    - how to setup to run all of them in parallel to save time of testing

This talk showcases how you can develop a framework in Java with all kinds of features like WebTesting with Selenium, Service Layer testing with SoapUI and Load Testing with JMeter - all packaged as a single testing solution. Above all, make use of open source libraries and get details HTML reports as well as Summary reports. This solution allows you to seamlessly integrate all your testing requirements under a single framework.

Advanced users in Selenium are given the challenging task of developing a framework from scratch. However, its best to understand the core requirements of how the framework is going to be utilized in order to develop the framework with minimal efforts. This tutorial teaches development of core-building blocks that can be implemented for any Selenium based framework with maximum flexibility and minimum efforts.