Selenium: State of the Union

This talk suggests a reframe in how we understand the business value of automated testing. One shift is to see automation as "checking" rather than "testing". Another is the shift from software delivery to service delivery, including fully embracing DevOps. The resulting approach could be called Checking as a Service or CheckOps, and forces us to rethink traditional automation priorities. In this talk, Bret will explain how change in approach has affected teams he's worked with and how you can use it to improve your ability to deliver valued services.

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.

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.

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 :)

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!

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.

Creating automated tests for a web application can be challenging. During this talk we will discuss how to use the popular browser automation framework, Selenium, to create automated tests for web applications. We will examine using Selenium and Java to automate the web browser using Selenium WebDriver.  Also we will talk about the implementation of a simple, maintainable framework for testing a web application using Selenium.

More and more companies are using responsive web to solve their digital requirements when user can execute any transactions from any screen.

The varieties of screen sizes, browsers, devices and OS required more UI and end-user testing.

One of the method to run end-user testing is monkey tests (executed clicks on random locations on the screen).

The DOM object tree contains a lot of data which can help us to generate tests.

In this session, I will describe how to use the DOM data to automatically build an object repository and to generate tests without writing any code.

One more aspect of the UI testing is the validations, in the session i will show how to execute visual validation from standard selenuim test.

I will also show how to:

• Use on test on Mobile and big screen browsers.
• Execute Tests on different devices and operating system in parallel. 
• Add real user condition and persona base testing to your current tests. 
• Smart reporting 

For more details see: zero-effort-automation

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.

Writing automated tests is pretty easy. Writing Great automated tests is pretty hard. By "Great" I mainly mean:

1. Easy to maintain

2. Readable

3. Reliable

4. Reusable

In this hands-on workshop I'll give very clear guidelines for writing such tests and their required infrastructure

As a test automation consultant who builds the infrastructure for many test automation projects, I found myself writing some common code over and over again. At some point I decided to collect all of this common code into one open-source project called “Test Automation Essentials”, so both others and I can use it in more projects. The project is composed of few small C# libraries, so you can use only the parts you really need. These libraries range from very generic utilities (that may be useful even in non-test projects) to more specific CodedUI and Selenium utilities. In this session, I will show the main utilities in these libraries and talk about the process of creating it. Even if you are not developing your test code in C#, I am sure you will get some ideas that you can use in other languages and tools too! (For more information see Test Automation Essentials)

Among the features of these libraries are:

• A straight-forward API to handle frames/iframes and multiple browser windows, avoiding unneccesary StaleElementExceptions and the combersome need for SwitchTo().
• A WaitForElement method that simpilfies the usage of explicit wait (i.e. WebDriverWait), and avoiding the the time-wasting implicit wait when using FindElements.
• An automatic logging of every Click and SendKeys actions
• A simple way to write reliable and reusable cleanup code
• Many syntactic sugars (mainly in the form of Extension Methods) that makes the code more readable

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.