ABOUT THE WEBINAR One of the largest challenges with creating any test automation suite is simultaneously ensuring scalability, maintainability and reliability. To meet this challenge, an automation suite around Selenium needs to address the measurement and reporting of test coverage and test success, as well as build a strategy for change tolerance through object recognition and code maintainability. Experts from Qualitest and Sauce Labs will explore different design approaches to test automation with Selenium and how they can help to ensure success across several key factors.

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Three Approaches to Optimizing Your Selenium
Test Designs
Presented by QualiTest and Sauce Labs, Inc.11/4/2015

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Brian Van Stone – Solutions
Architect, QualiTest
Neil Manvar – Solutions
Architect, Sauce Labs

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Agenda
Good design approaches with Selenium
Different types of test designs
• Page Object Model
• Behavior Driven Development
• Keyword Driven Design
Pros and cons of design methodologies
Q&A

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The Importance of Design
• Key Success Factors in Test
Automation
• Strong Design
• Consistency
• Reliability
• Benefits
• Faster development
• More accurate results
• Reduced cost of maintenance
• Ability to address absent
features of Selenium

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Page Object Design Pattern
• Definition: Model the UI components of your application as Page Objects which:
• Expose the services of a page to the test developer
• Abstract the deep knowledge of page structure away from the test
• Disadvantages:
• Cost of framework development
• Not ideal for all applications
• Some pages can be highly interactive
and serve a very large amount of
content
• Requires a high degree of technical
proficiency from the testing team
• Advantages:
• High tolerance of changes in the UI
• Intuitive model for automating workflow driven
functionality
• Parallelism with other design patterns like
MVC
• Reduction in code duplication
• Coupling of object recognition and app
functionality

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Why Page Object?
• Reasons to consider page object
design:
• Large amounts of workflow driven
content that lends itself to page-by-
page automation
• Leveraging synergy with a
development team employing the
MVC design pattern
• Separation of implementation from
presentation reduces maintenance
costs
• Reasons to explore other options:
• Large amounts of highly interactive
single-page content. This is
becoming less common than it once
was.
• Requirement or desire to involve
non-technical SMEs in the test
design and execution processes

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Page Object Sample and Further Discussion

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BDD
• BDD = Behavior Driver Development
• maintainable, readable, easy to debug
• Test Automation Framework
• Cucumber
• Selenium-Webdriver
• Page-Object
• Selenium-Webdriver

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Testing using BDD Tools - Pro / Cons
• Pros
• Requirements and Behavior are clear
• Can be read / understood by all
• Easier to debug and maintain
• Test case is from a “user” perspective
• Cons
• Another layer / technology that is introduced into
tech stack
• Onboarding – how to write proper step definitions,
features, scenario outlines, regex’s, etc.

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Keyword Driven Testing (KDT)
• Definition: Represent functionality to be tested as keywords which are executed in
combination to model test behavior
• Disadvantages:
• Risk of dependency creation between
keywords must be mitigated by design
• Sometimes such dependencies are
unavoidable
• Maintenance costs are generally
managed more by design than by
technical savvy.
• Addresses only application functionality
rather than application objects
• Requires additional design of an object
recognition strategy
• Advantages:
• Strong and clear separation of design,
data, and development
• Capacity to understand test automation
flow without much or any technical
knowledge
• Extreme abstraction of automation
implementation

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Why KDT?
• Reasons to consider KDT:
• Culture and support structure tending
towards business driven test design
• Separation of design, data, and
development
• Organizational structure will sometimes
lend these three categories to different
existing roles in the organization
• Requirement to have non-programming
personnel interact with test automation
(design, execution, or analysis)
• Very easy to data-drive tests
• Reasons to explore other options:
• Large amounts of dependent functionality
• You can model workflows in KDT but
complex workflows can present issues
• Desire to keep test automation technical
and reduce design overhead

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KDT Sample and Further Discussion
• Start with a generic keyword
• Create a concept for an execution flow
• Make sure keyword execution can handle
exception cases
• Devise a strategy for sharing data
between keywords and/or tests

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KDT Sample and Further Discussion
• Create the core of the framework that
enables execution of tests
• Create a primary driver class which can
parse your input (driven by spreadsheet,
xml files, JSON, etc.)
• Control execution flow at the highest level
here. Have a hierarchy of classes to
support each level (Test Cases,
Keywords, etc.)
• The most light weight means of execution
will be driving it through a main method
and simply invoking it from the command
line
• Reflection is your friend

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KDT Sample and Further Discussion
• With the core framework in place,
build useful and reusable keywords
• This is a prototype for a keyword
that manages connections
• Create an abstract class which
manages connection creation/reuse
during initialization
• And manages connection
cleanup/rollback during cleanup

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KDT Sample and Further Discussion
• Create simple keywords leveraging
abstract functionality
• Keywords that perform a specific task
should perform ONLY that task whenever
possible
• A specific keyword implementation should
only care about the arguments unique to it
• Reduce maintenance costs by eliminating
boiler plate or common code

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Summary
• Key Takeaways
• Design, design, design
• Focus on reducing maintenance costs
• Choose the best fit

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Questions?

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More Info on Sauce Labs
Resources
• WhitePaper: How to get the most out of your CI / CD work flow with automated
testing
http://tinyurl.com/p5umo6p
• Sauce Labs Docs – tutorials for writing scripts
https://docs.saucelabs.com/
• Sign up for a free trial of Sauce
https://saucelabs.com/signup/trial

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More Info QualiTest
Resources
• Check us out!
http://www.qualitestgroup.com
• See some stories of what we have done with Selenium!
http://www.qualitestgroup.com/software-testing/testing-services-through-selenium/

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Thank you!