02: Dave Haeffner : The Selenium Guidebook

The Selenium GuideBook

Dave Haeffner, the author of the new book The Selenium GuideBook: How to Use Selenium , successfully – shares with us his  experience on how to succeed with test automation.

About Dave Haeffner

Dave is the writer of Elemental Selenium — a free, once weekly Selenium tip newsletter that is read by hundreds of testing professionals. He is also the creator and maintainer of ChemistryKit (an open-source Selenium framework). He has helped numerous companies successfully implement automated acceptance testing; including The Motley Fool, ManTech International, Sittercity, and Animoto. He is a founder and co-organizer of the Selenium Hangout and has spoken at numerous conferences and meetups about acceptance testing.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• How technology can help us achieve more by leveraging computers to do what they’re best at; freeing up humans to do what they’re best at.
• Learning Selenium is not a technical problem; it’s an information problem.
• Figure out who will own the automation framework in order to decide what programming language to use for Selenium automation. Remember: a programming language is simply a means to solve a problem when it comes to full stack testing; it’s not as though one is better suited than another.
• There are really only four key elements to create a rock solid framework:

1. Test Parallelization,
2. Reporting,
3. Simple command line wrapper,
4. Cloud execution.

• Use page objects!
• Write atomic tests to setup and teardown data.
• Create shallow test and deep test to help create quick feedback loop in your CI environment.
• Automation for automation sake with 100% code coverage is a farce because its probably not going to give you what you think.

Resources

Java for Testers – Alan Richardson
Selenium 2 Testing Tools: Beginner's Guide – David Burns
Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing –Gojko Adzic

Connect with Dave

Dave's blog

Dave's weekly must read newsletter Elemental Selenium
Twitter: @TourDeDave