My speech at Selenium Conf 2014 http://confengine.com/selenium-conf-2014/schedule#session-217-info

1. Increase Selenium tests stability
via JavaScript
Igor Khrol
http://www.khroliz.com

2. About myself
• Igor Khrol
• QA Automation Team Lead at
Wargaming
• >8 years in test automation
• Dozens of projects
• Engineer, trainer, consultant,
manager, speaker
• Working experience with
Selenium >5 years
• My blog: http://en.khroliz.com

3. Agenda
• Theory and some reasoning
• Practical cases

4. Dependency between testing level and
support
Support
Test
count
Tech level

5. UI-tests are unstable

6. UI-tests are unstable
One of the reasons – modern user
interfaces:
– Complex
– Asynchronous

7. Modern user interfaces are based on
prepared and already made
components

8. Modern user interfaces are based on
prepared and already made
components

9. Already made components could be
less tested by ourselves

10. Custom components could be tested
separately

11. Majority of modern UI has internal API

12. API benefits
• Build to interact with UI components
• Synchronous (or there are methods to sync)

13. 1. UI based on already made components
2. Already made components could be left
untested or could be tested separately
3. Components have its own API
4. That API is more reliable thanWebDriver API
Use JavaScript API instead of WebDriver

14. Life example

15. User interface characteristics:
• Lots of frames
• ActiveX

16. Initial solution
driver.findElement(By.id(“fancy-id”)).click();
WebDriver API
Browser

17. Difficulties
• Interface is very asynchronous, methods work
unstably
• Lots of frames (more than five nested) – hard
to reach required control
• Impossible to work with ActiveX

18. Browser Script API
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B40099_02/books/OI
Ref/OIRefBrowseScript.html
Browser Script HTTP Server Script

19. Examples

20. Final result
• Quick
• Reliable
• Synchronous

21. Problems

22. Synchronous methods and Alert
• Method call is not finished while Alert is not
closed
• alert.accept() can’t be called as
previous command is not finished yet

23. window.setTimeout

24. Lost 100% end user simulation

25. Other cases for such approach

26. jQuery based sites - 60%

27. Synchronization

28. Convert jQuery objects to WebElement
and vise versa

29. Find elements

30. Get parent element

31. Ease interaction with complex
elements
Calendar Thanks to @barancev

32. Custom controls

33. Custom controls

34. Common schema
Web Server
Browser
HTTP
Tests
Visible UI
Library
API Components
Core
WebDriver API
WebDriver API
JavaScriptExecutor

35. Temporary workaround existing
WebDriver issues

36. Workaround wisely
• Only temporary workaround
• Important to understand why standard
approach doesn’t work

37. Summary
• Digging into technical details allows writing more
reliable tests
• Learning JavaScript and UI-libraries – natural next
step for UI test automation
• But we have to understand what we are missing
and find balance

38. Thank you!
Questions?
Igor Khrol
http://en.khroliz.com
i_khrol@wargaming.net / khroliz@gmail.com