Automated Web Application Testing with Selenium

September 12, 2006

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Outline
What is Selenium? Writing Maintainable Selenium Tests Writing Testable Web Applications

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What is Selenium?
Open source test tool for web applications
http://selenium.openqa.org

Runs in any mainstream browser

IE, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror

Write tests in many languages

Java, .NET, Perl, Python, Ruby Selenese (pure HTML, no Java/backend required)

Record/playback (Selenium IDE)

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Demo
Record a test in Selenium IDE Demo same test written in Java

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Java Test Example

public void testGoogleTestSearch() throws Throwable { selenium.open("http://www.google.com/webhp"); assertEquals("Google", selenium.getTitle()); selenium.type("q", "Selenium OpenQA"); selenium.click("btnG"); selenium.waitForPageToLoad("5000"); assertEquals("Selenium OpenQA - Google Search", selenium.getTitle()); }

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Java setUp/tearDown Example

public void setUp() throws Exception { selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*firefox", "http://www.google.com"); selenium.start(); } protected void tearDown() throws Exception { selenium.stop(); }
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A Few Selenium Commands

click close createCookie dragdrop fireEvent getCursorPosition getEval getHtmlSource getTitle getValue goBack isTextPresent isVisible keyPress mouseOver open refresh type

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Element Locators
selenium.click(____) ID: id=foo Name: name=foo Identifier (ID, then name): identifier=foo DOM: document.forms[myform].myDropdown XPath: //table[@id='table1']//tr[4]/td[2] Link Text: link=text CSS Selector: css=a[href=#id3] Default:
DOM if it starts with document. XPath if it starts with // Identifier otherwise
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How It Works

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Outline
What is Selenium? Writing Maintainable Selenium Tests Writing Testable Web Applications

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Standard End-User Black Box Test

1. Login as administrator 2. Create a user 3. Log out 4. Login as that user 5. Create a folder 6. Create a thingy in that folder 7. Search for that thingy in the search box 8. Make sure your thingy shows up on the search results page

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Fragile automated tests

Exercising irrelevant features
Logging in/Logging out Creating a folder Creating a thingy

If the UI for any one of those features changes, your search test fails

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Know When to Record a Test

Recorded tests reuse no code Record & Tweak vs. Fire and Forget Slight change in Folder Creator means all of those tests have to be re-recorded from scratch
This happened to us with Mercurys Quick Test Pro

Use the recorder to create reusable code

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Unit Testing vs. Integration Testing

Selenium tests are integration tests, not unit tests
Functional/Acceptance/User/Compatibility

Unit tests verify a unit in isolation

If FooTest.java fails, the bug must be in Foo.java A unit test should never fail because of a browser incompatibility Unit tests need to be completely isolated from each other

Integration tests verify that units work well together

Black Box tests Requires testing multiple configurations (browsers) Tend to build on the side-effects of earlier tests

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JUnit and TestNG

JUnit is opinionated software JUnit: Everything gets teared down after every test method
Order isolation [see next slide] Constantly starting/stopping browser

Dependencies between tests is explicitly prevented

Separate tests are testing separate units

TestNG: dependsOnX Same test multiple times, different configurations?

Java Properties, multiple runs TestNG parameters

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JUnit Test Execution

public void setUp() { log(setup!); } public void testFoo() { log(foo!); } public void testBar() { log(bar!); } public void tearDown() { log(teardown!); } Runs like this
setup! foo! teardown! setup! bar! teardown!

NOT like this

setup! foo! bar! teardown!
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Outline
What is Selenium? Writing Maintainable Selenium Tests Writing Testable Web Applications

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Testable HTML Pages

Human-legible (hand-coded) element IDs
id=obj3 is going to be fragile XPaths are very fragile JSF: TLD <required>true</required> on ID elements

Hidden flags: input fields, object properties

waitForCondition is your AJAX testing tool

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Model View Controller

Model is separately testable
Thats where your business logic is! Write Integration tests of those!

Use Selenium to test your view and controller (navigation) UI Testing API Testing Model Unit Testing Classes

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Another Code Reuse Strategy

Prepare your Search tests using Model API tests
FolderBean fb = new FolderBean(); fb.setParent(FolderBean.ROOT); fb.setName(foo); fb.createNewFolder(); adds a folder to the DB selenium.open(/search.faces); selenium.type(query, foo); selenium.click(search); assertTrue(selenium.isTextPresent(foo found);

Writing your tests/webapp in same language

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Self-testing web applications

Create a special JSP that runs Selenium tests
Configure Session-scoped beans

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