Are you a tester who wants to get started with Selenium and C#? Or are you an automation engineer and want to learn more about Page Object or running your tests in parallel testing? In this episode Nikolay Advolodkin, founder of UltimateQA and the #1 Selenium WebDriver instructor in the world as rated by Udemy.com, shares with us some tips, tricks and more from his popular video courses on test automation.
About Nikolay Advolodkin
Nikolay Advolodkin is a prolific Automation Test & Quality Assurance Engineer. Currently, he is the CEO and Software Testing Instructor at UltimateQA.com. He has been voted as one of 33 Test Automation Leaders to follow in 2017 by TechBeacon.com. He is also the #1 Selenium Webdriver instructor in the world as rated by Udemy.com. Nikolay is a frequent Contributor for the blog, SimpleProgrammer.com and a speaker at Automation Guild 2017.When he isn’t immersed in the realm of coding and all-things QA, Nikolay Advolodkin enjoys self-improvement and aims to hone his vast skill set daily, all while teaching online students how to master automated software testing.
Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk
- I think it's really critical to have proper synchronization techniques in your automated functional tests. I think that's one of the main issues that a lot of us experience flakiness in our test automation is because the web is just getting more complicated these days. If you guys saw my presentation from the Automation Guild, I mentioned why the web is getting more complicated but obviously the web is attempting to provide the end user a better experience. With that come things like AJAX that'll allow the application to load asynchronously. We start using things like angular JS so that the application loads faster, the user doesn't have to wait as long and it's a overall better experience for the end user.
- The selenium web drivers C# bindings are a little bit different than the Java bindings. Not totally different, they're just different naming conventions of classes. In the Java bindings, you have the web driver weight class and the web driver weight class inherits from some class. However, in c sharp, the web driver weight class inherits from a default weight class. That's just a different naming convention and so the default weight basically the parent of the web driver weight class and it allows you to customize the attributes of your web driver weight class.
- At some point, your tests are going to take a really long time to run. Hours upon hours and it's going to become unacceptable to you so at that point when it becomes unacceptable, all you have to do is put on the parallelizable attribute. You'll definitely have to do a little bit of playing around with Sauce Labs to get it configured. It's not so hard, but there are a few little nuances for that. Once you hook it up to Sauce Labs or browser stack, those are two options, but like you said, Joe, Sauce Labs is definitely better, then you'll be able to run them in Sauce Labs without many issues
- It's really funny because I've read a lot of books and a lot of articles and watched a lot of videos on test automation, but I feel like the most impactful book that I've read that's helped me improve my test automation was Clean Code by Bob Martin.
- I always listen to your test talks so I knew this question would come up so I've been thinking about it over the past few days. What's the one piece of actionable advice that I can give to all of you guys. At least in my point of view, I think the thing that has helped me the most in my career and has given me the most bang for my buck was to never stop learning. Regardless of what it is, whatever field you're in, I think it's really important to always take a little bit of time out of your day to learn something new. Not just learning on your nine to five job, but to maybe take half an hour, maybe an hour out of your day to just improve your skills even further.
Resources
- Nikolay's Automation Guild on Using the Page Object Pattern to Drastically Stabilize Your Automation
- Clean Code by Bob Martin
- Selenium with C#Video Course
- Page Object in Test Automation Video Course
- C# for QA Automation Engineers Video Course
- Parallel Testing Video Course
Connect with Nikolay Advolodkin
- Twitter: @Nikolay_A00
- Blog: ultimateqa
- LinkedIn:Â nikolayadvolodkin
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