Ultimate Selenium WebDriver Guide for Test Automation with Robin Gupta

[00:00:00] In a land of testers, far and wide they journeyed. Seeking answers, seeking skills, seeking a better way. Through the hills they wandered, through treacherous terrain. But then they heard a tale, a podcast they had to obey. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Guiding testers with automation awesomeness. From ancient realms to modern days, they lead the way. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Guiding testers with automation awesomeness. From ancient realms to modern days, they lead the way. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. Oh, the Test Guild Automation Testing podcast. With lutes and lyres, the bards began their song. A tune of knowledge, a melody of code. Through the air it spread, like wildfire through the land. Guiding testers, showing them the secrets to behold.

[00:01:53] Joe Colantonio Hey it's Joe, and welcome to another episode of The Test Guild Autoation Podcast. And today, you're in for a special treat because we are talking with Robin all about his new book, Ultimate Selenium WebDriver for Test Automation. If you don't know, Robin has been around for a while. He considers himself a MOM, which say manager of managers at office and dad at home, obviously. He heads product technology and applied AI at Provar. And outside of office, he's the international speaker. I actually saw him at, I think Selenium Conference in Chicago last year. Open source contributor. He has a really cool tool. I thought I've talked to him about before, but I haven't. TestZeus and obviously, an author really exciting to have on the show. You don't want to miss this episode, check it out.

[00:02:33] Joe Colantonio Hey, Robin, welcome to The Guild.

[00:02:35] Robin Gupta Hey. Hi, Joe. Thank you for having me at The Guild. It's such a pleasure and so happy for The Guild and for you.

[00:02:45] Joe Colantonio Awesome to have you. I could have sworn I had you on before talking about TestZeus, I looked over my notes. I looked over my backlog, I found nothing. I'm already off topic. I always wanted to have you on the show to talk about TestZeus. So really quick. What is TestZeus?

[00:03:02] Robin Gupta It's an open source wrapper on top of Selenium. So it's a small test automation framework specially built for Salesforce.

[00:03:08] Joe Colantonio Awesome. So that's probably I'll have to have you back to talk all about it. But if you do anything with Salesforce, that's something you should definitely check out. And we'll have a link for it in the links down below. All right, Robin, I ask every author before we get into it why? Why did they write a book? It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. I know you're very busy, so why? Why write this book?

[00:03:27] Robin Gupta I think two reasons. One is like an emotional reason and one is a logical reason. The emotional reason is like I always wanted to give back to the community. I'm one of those guy have contributed to Selenium and to other projects. I really want to teach and help the community. That is the first one. The logical reason is very simple. In my experience, the technical books on Selenium are very technical. They assume that you know Java and you know Maven, and you know TestNG, and testing and so on, so forth. My book doesn't assume any of that. So we have chapters on all of these topics and ranging from 0 to 100. That is the logical reason for writing this book.

[00:04:09] Joe Colantonio Nice. So it sounds like if someone has no experience whatsoever and they say, hey, how do I get into automation, I go buy this book. It'll help them. Is that how it works?

[00:04:17] Robin Gupta Definitely. That is the idea. That's the target user persona.

[00:04:20] Joe Colantonio Awesome. And it's interesting because like you mentioned, it's I think it's nine chapters. The first one is introduction to Selenium Test Automation and you use Selenium IDE. So there's been some not controversy about Selenium IDE. I believe it used to be something and then it went away. And then they had a new version. And now I don't know if they have a new version on top of the new version. So why? Do you still recommend people start with Selenium IDE and why did you start the chapter up like this?

[00:04:44] Robin Gupta Yeah, the first chapter in my book also is actually starting Selenium IDE that is how I started with it. That is how I got bit by the automation bug. And you can automate some stuff and it runs on it. So that's very magical. We don't have to do a click. Oh wow! Magical. So controversy the site, I think the Selenium community and open source contributors like Todd Tarsi have done a phenomenal job. But then use Selenium IDE, it's very simple and it's a small app which runs on your desktop using the Chrome plugin platform. And you can automate scenarios and get into the world of test automation, a browser automation.

[00:05:23] So obviously, you recommend if someone's just starting off, it just gets them more familiar with the concepts. Maybe not necessarily. Hey, this is the approach you're going to use for your automation from now until the end using Selenium IDE, it seems like it's a good thing to start off with just to find out what the principles are and then maybe modify it. Is that why you start with this?

[00:05:41] Robin Gupta Yeah, exactly. Rather than just pushing people into the web driver, we want to give them a slow ramp up time that, hey, try this Chrome plugin. You can automate a few browser actions. You can really automate a small test case.

[00:05:54] Joe Colantonio Love it. And then I think up until you go into the fundamentals of test automation, I think is chapter two. What strategies? What are some strategies you think someone starting off with automation in general, even if it's not Selenium? What do they need to know about test automation?

[00:06:08] Robin Gupta Yeah, I think even before they go to test automation they should go to testing. So chapter two is a little bit about quality and testing in the modern times of Gen AI and all these frameworks and pyramids and whatnot. And then we jump into test automation. So that is the idea, the first focus on the quality, talk to your users, the standard requirements, see who are your stakeholders, what's your scope, what's the environment test data. Once you have the notion of a test case, a test script, something which is repeatable will help in regression, why not let us automate and then we go to test automation?

[00:06:42] Joe Colantonio Why do you think that's important? Because when I started, you can tell I'm very old. For some reason it was more testers using tools to help them with testing. But now it seems like sometimes people just jump, I'm an Automation engineer. And then I know testing it. I don't know if maybe I'm just an old man going, get off my grass. Learn testing. Is that true? Do you think people don't necessarily stuff as a tester anymore? They just jump to tooling?

[00:07:05] Robin Gupta Yeah, 100%. So in my circle, we have this thing. So you would have heard about behavior-driven development BDD. Have you heard about RDD?

[00:07:14] Joe Colantonio No.

[00:07:15] Robin Gupta Resume-Driven development. Just because Cypress looks cool on your Selenium or Selenium looks cool on your resume. People go and jump on virtual forgetting all about testing and quality and users and specifications and whatnot. It's not an old man thing. It's just a human thing that focus on the quality. Automation is a means to an end.

[00:07:39] Joe Colantonio Love it. Love it. And I definitely agree. So if someone has a better testing background, the automation is going to be better because it's actually going to be adding value. It sounds like.

[00:07:48] Robin Gupta 100%. The automated test cases, even though few would be 100x better than 100 test cases, which are of low quality.

[00:07:57] Joe Colantonio So if someone's working for a company, do you think the company understands that though? So is it more like someone's like, I just need to do automation because that's what the company wants. And so I'm going to sacrifice quality because I'm being judged by I created 100 automated test. Or is it like a balance where not only do you have to be a good tester, but you need to educate team on what good testing is?

[00:08:17] Robin Gupta Interestingly, I think whether it's testing or DevOps or development, all of these need buy in from other stakeholders. And therefore, let's say, for example, of quality or testing. I think in my experience, the testers are not just supposed to highlight the bugs in the product, but also in the process or humans. If let's say, I come to you and say, hey, I just want test automation, Robin. I would ask you maybe five questions as a tester. What's your target scope? What's the outcome that you're looking for? What is a good bar of quality for you? Do we really need it today or we're not mature enough to have it for the next three months. I think those meaningful conversations are required in a lot of big organizations, big teams. Some of that nuance gets lost or people just get driven by a certain tool or a framework that should not happen.

[00:09:07] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. So once they understand testing then, I know the book is about Selenium. So why would they choose Selenium? I mean, I love Selenium, but a lot of groups now, they're like, oh, you should try, Cypress is the right tool or a Playwright. Playwright, Selenium is dead or Cypress is dead. Like how do you know then once you know testing? What tool to use for your particular situation?

[00:09:27] Robin Gupta Yeah. So I think in my head there are these three things which would help you decide at a high level. And also it's not just open source tools or open code tools like Selenium and Playwright and Cypress. Even awesome tool Provar or the others in the market. I wouldn't vouch about them, but nonetheless, I think these two things, people process technology. When I say people, it's your team, let's say me and you or that engineering team, developer to your product manager and my engineer manager are all of us from the same background. And maybe the four people are more JavaScript oriented, but I'm really Java guy. And also our application doesn't require a lot of strong cross-browser test automation and maybe more component-level testing and automation. So let's try WebDriverio or Cypress. Right. So that is a people aspect. Process, how much are we. Do we have this cases? We have a few test cases already written in some language unit integration. And do we have the budget to have tools or do we want to go open source because we feel we are strong engineers? And last but not least, the technology. Not just your technology or that whatnot in the whole banking company. How does it line to the Center of Excellence or those multiple teams who go towards a common goal, who maybe work towards a Black Friday release or something? These three things can help people decide which technology tool test framework to use rather than just because, Oh Robin said on that podcast special to Selenium, they should do Selenium.

[00:10:57] Joe Colantonio So Robin, you did say some interesting. I'm not trying to get you in trouble, but you like you contributed Selenium, you contributed testers open source, but you sound like you said, open source is not always the answer.

[00:11:07] Robin Gupta Exactly.

[00:11:08] Joe Colantonio That seems to be a struggle sometimes because like you said, it depends on your team. It depends on your technology. And I love vendors. Sometimes a vendor actually makes sense for certain situations to me.

[00:11:18] Robin Gupta Yeah. So interestingly, let's say, Provar is an example. Yeah. So the target persona that we have, it's for the citizen tester. Now if you go by a Salesforce definition of multiple roles, we have an Admin, we have a developer, we have a business analyst. And these folks deliver the software on top of the Salesforce platform. Now each of these could be a tester or we are testers had. And maybe if they've done a few releases, neither are they technical nor do they have the time to go into open source and build all of the test automation framework. So go with the tool. It will get you started very quickly. And some of these tools for example Provar is very focused on Salesforce. So you don't have to bother about maintenance all but that is just an example. Do that analysis, talk to the team. And in addition to all of this the budget should be there.

[00:12:05] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. So in the book it assumes you've done that. You've decided I'm going with Selenium. So chapter three goes over some basics of WebDriver. What are some basics people need to know about Selenium? I think one of the things you go over is locatorstrategy, but other other things or why locator's strategy so important?

[00:12:22] Robin Gupta Yeah. So interestingly, for humans like us, same you, when we look at a website, let's say the Gmail application, we can see there is the compose button inbox where are my emails and all. But how do we have an automation. So you take a look at that UI is to locators and that is why it is so important. I assume that if I have a blindfold and I am going to test a website, how helpful I would be as a QA. Similarly, for test automation, the concept of locators is very important because it helps the automation script locate elements on the screen and therefore interact with them. So that is one concept, coding strategy is another concept. Like if you click on the send button, how quickly the next screen comes up, or when you click the submit button in a form. Does it take one second? Does it take three seconds? Is your internet slow? The automation script needs to know when the next thing is coming. So that is another very key concept in test automation.

[00:13:14] Joe Colantonio So for a beginner though this could be tricky. And I know some of the other newer tooling. I guess the issue is Selenium is an API and so you could do anything with it. That's what's awesome about it. And you have some other tooling that is like kind of like it's more like a framework where has built in things where you don't have to build them from scratch. So it seems like locator strategy, some of these other tools have things that you don't have to worry about it, but with Selenium you do. Anything you could do to make it easier then for the locator strategy?

[00:13:41] Robin Gupta Okay. I think first of all, Selenium also did a lot of thing. For example, recently we have the near by locators. So if you are looking at the homepage, we can say click on the submit button to the right of login button. So that makes it simpler. But also if you go to Selenium.dev or the homepage the Selenium projects, Selenium HQ. It says Selenium automates web browsers. That's it. What you do with it is your decision. If you want to build scrapers, test automation, process automation, makes all the programs and therefore we provide them tools. For example, locators and some of these pieces where the test engineer or automation engineer can fine tune those buttons and does not assume on the behalf of the process. Some of these other tools make these assumptions and try to make it simpler. But see, it's always a tradeoff between simplicity and accuracy. So it depends if you want to be accurate or simple, both, never.

[00:14:40] Joe Colantonio Right. And also some tools are very opinionated. Like this is how you do it. And like you have to force it down the throat of your team. This is how we have to do it now, where if you're more like free flowing and you like to be in control, Selenium gives you that flexibility.

[00:14:54] Robin Gupta Exactly. I think this Selenium was built by engineers for engineers. I don't believe that, I think.

[00:15:01] Joe Colantonio Okay, so now I'm jumping ahead. But it just it's I think we need address it here is Selenium the folks that a lot and making it a standard for a long time. And so some of the features weren't necessarily updated as much. But then Selenium 4 came out I think really put it up into the class of where like all the functionality, all these other tools start to have. I don't know, I'm not sure if that message has been out there. When you talk about locator strategy and things like that, before we go into like more advanced Selenium techniques, do you think Selenium 4 has incorporated features that people still don't know about that makes it like a modern test tool now or test API?

[00:15:38] Robin Gupta Yeah, yeah, I'll be very honest over here. Maybe a little controversial is that Selenium has been this very engineering focused open source project. The marketing has recently started picking it up from an open source perspective. And they're just now started talking about all these other ideas. Let's say we have these nearby locators. You could find them. We have a new bidi. Nobody else does that. Why don't you give it a shot? So we recently started speaking about it as they have built it to a certain stability. And now I see that the graph is only in the upright direction. So people will get more, more visibility through conferences like Selenium Conference to my book to Joe Colantino's podcast. So hopefully will solve it.

[00:16:21] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. So once they know the basics, then they jump into some advanced techniques. And I know one thing a lot of people struggle with, with the Shadow Dom. And I know tooling like WebDriverio addresses this fairly nicely. So if someone's just using straight up Selenium, are you still able to like deal with things like Shadow Doms or what are other techniques they need to know about?

[00:16:40] Robin Gupta Shadow Dom is an interesting one. So as we discussed earlier, some tools like let's say WebDriverio have methods implemented for later as part of the core library. As part of Selenium 4, a lot of those pieces are implemented, but maybe not exposed to the user. What we could do is add some scaffolding, some more methods in the framework and then actually handle any of those web elements. Plus, with the advent of the bidi and how we are doing CDP, this will just become easier and easier as you go along.

[00:17:08] Joe Colantonio Do you have any thoughts about Bidi in this chapter for advanced Selenium techniques?

[00:17:12] Robin Gupta That is even further. The journey of the reader in the book is like get started with testing automation basics. Go to what Selenium Basics, understand the advanced Selenium techniques and then boom! Then we'll have chapter about the architecture for Selenium. They are not intimidated.

[00:17:27] Joe Colantonio Okay. All right. Cool. Again like into it in the advanced techniques. But then, I think the next then like you said it goes sequentially. So anyone could start from beginner end up as an expert. I think the next chapter that everyone struggles with, as well as a test automation frameworks. Any tips on creating a framework in how to get stuck and building all this stuff before your team even tries using it?

[00:17:50] Robin Gupta Interestingly, this was something that I faced many years back when I was working with the test Automation project, and a wise human told me that you don't need to reinvent the wheel. You can go in the internet and there are many different frameworks which are available for people from frameworks like Selenide, ATATA, or even TestZeus. They are open source wrappers for Selenium or around it which has these opinionated implementations for language bindings C#, Python, Java, JavaScript, and for specific purposes like testing and automation. So you can pick one of these. Or if you really want to jump into the deep vein of building a framework. The book also covers some fundamental pieces where we tell the reader that this is how you can go about building these blocks and setting up the reusable boxes, like the ever controversial page objects.

[00:18:37] Joe Colantonio Why the controversy? Why controversial?

[00:18:41] Robin Gupta Interestingly page, Factory or page objects came up as a recommendation for emulating the website. For example, if you have a login page and have the first name or username and password and submit button, it was intended that model the same thing in languages, in particular programing languages like Java as a small object. And if you go by good design practices, each of these would be individually implemented on that Java object. But how people took it was that every web page becomes a page object. We should have a login page object and the homepage object. If your homepage object has three pieces, all of them should be on the homepage object. And we should make that 5000 line class code. So that's why it is controversial that it's a design pattern or a recommendation. Does it apply to you? That it depends. But people just took it and ran with it.

[00:19:33] Joe Colantonio All right, so this may sound weird, like why create an automation framework, as you mentioned from the ground up? I would think you need to be a developer to do that. A lot of times I see testers that have a testing background trying to do it, that it's not a not making fun of them, but it's like you're not a developer. Why are you trying to create a development framework from the ground up? When you have excellent solutions like WebDriverio, you have Serenity, you have Karate, you have all these solutions that are open source. Why do this? If someone's like I am, I create a framework?

[00:20:01] Robin Gupta Let me take an example, if I offer you. Joe, would you like to buy a new car or would you like to use my old car? It runs fine and it gets the grocery. But you would tap it and then say that it. Oh no, no, no, I'll build my own car. I'm feeling like an engineer today. This is my thing that I've been assembling my own ideas to. So that is why a lot of teams and engineers tend to do that without realizing that is the other gold line outside.

[00:20:28] Joe Colantonio And they could have taken the car and been to like Vegas and come back while you're still building your framework. Not having fun at all, right?

[00:20:36] Robin Gupta Exactly. People just get stuck in these three months, six months sprints and cycle. I put in my own framework to automate two test cases.

[00:20:44] Joe Colantonio Yes. Right, right. All right. So another thing people show what they like. So they have the basics. They have the advanced techniques to create a framework, and they're ready to roll ready to scale up. And this is where I see people crash because like they have 1 or 2 tasks, they run fine 1 or 2 sprints and then forget about it. It goes downhill from there. What are some scaling tips you have or distributing test tips you have in chapter six?

[00:21:06] Robin Gupta I think it's very simple. So it's like what other feedback I got when I was doing as an engineering leader. There is this piece of feedback that you should crawl, walk, run, fly. So rather than just jumping on to an actual automated universe, let's go step by step. Don't skip scope all of your hundred test cases. Automation, if you like, do sprints and don't kill yourself because the free gift of maintenance comes with every automated test case. So you have to think slow and steady and overall larger for all set. But also it's not about not automating all those cases, but providing the economies of scale or saving that time with that automation. In simple terms, crawl, walk, run, fly, go step by step, scope it out. It's not a one time with lifetime of a chance. Run it for a while. Show the results then grow further. And second is retrospective and introspect for example, whatever you build out, just like how you would run a development sprint two retrospectives after every two sprints and understand what can be improved. Maybe there is some take that or there is some code which can be updated, or maybe the code coverage is not there, so it should be plugged into SonarQube and other tools. Those are some of the tips which I would recommend people for scalable and stable test automation.

[00:22:18] Joe Colantonio Do you cover anything with test data because I know sometimes that limits people how they can scale or even, they have dependencies like test one needs to run before test two, they have these weird combinations. Is that something you address at all?

[00:22:31] Robin Gupta Something which is highlighted in the book is also test data and the other like stuff rather of a test environments. Both of these need to be managed precisely. Not as part of the framework, but as part of the CI/CD pipeline. For example, the same test that I'm using should be used by the developer or the product manager or the person who's doing the final signing. Similarly for environments, not all tests need to be done on each environment. For example, on the development sandbox or developer on local setup based on the unit test cases on the SIT, system integration test run integration test. It's in the name. There is a hint. In the pre-production environment to your QA doing test cases, try to make a bit of made or a nice clean code or a rhombus, but don't just mix up everything.

[00:23:15] Joe Colantonio All right, so my next chapter, I'm drawn to it because I actually started my career more as a performance test engineer. I did functional automation but I did majority with load runner and performance testing. So this next chapter is SAS and Nonfunctional Test Automation. I see as a trend now I'm not sure if you see this or you cover this is a lot of people now are able to leverage that functional test to get some sort of nonfunctional benefit like performance and security. So what is this particular chapter address then?

[00:23:41] Robin Gupta Yeah. So increasingly it has these pieces. So for example, one thing is that the SAS test automation software as a service test automation is not the same as your B2C e-commerce website test automation. So throughout the book you try to maintain the same that don't do test automation just for the heck of it. Do it as per the scope or the target environment. And to your question, the nonfunctional test automation is like hardware. It's a gray area. You can use your functional tests for some performance testing, but it should be only some. You should not be scaling up all your end-to-end level. And let me check out a book from Amazon with 1000 test cases down Amazon today. That doesn't make any sense. So we should do it as per the test type. As for the environment.

[00:24:22] Joe Colantonio Great advice. So definitely check that chapter out. Okay I think it goes over the right approach for sure. All right. So the next one is once again you go on an X. And just to be Twitter different social media platforms. And you have people like BDD don't use it. But I've used BDD the right way. I've seen it use the right way and people benefit from it. Do you have a whole chapter on BDD with Selenium. So obviously, I assume you believe in BDD or like what are some things you go over in this chapter?

[00:24:49] Robin Gupta Interestingly, just like Selenium is not strongly opinionated and it gives you the tools to perform something. The idea of all these chapters in the book are that these are tools for you to use. They're not trying to say that no. Since you are the reader of this book, you must use BDD. Check it out. Try it out if you like it. If you want your product manager to write some non technical test cases, you can try BDD. But if anybody is any different on the team, just give that chapter. Go to the next chapter about AI.

[00:25:14] Joe Colantonio Yeah absolutely, love it. All right. I think one of the last chapters is new features and Selenium 4, we already touched on bidi, some other things that you have a Selenium test driver manager now or something that's able to handle the drivers for you? So what are some other features that you cover?

[00:25:30] Robin Gupta Interestingly the big ones are these two. So one is bidi. And this architectural change in Selenium 4. How it has become a W3C spec, and how it ensures that your test will run fine across all the browsers, in like real browsers. It's not like one of those big made up browser engines. So that is one big one. The second big chunk is Selenium Manager as highlighted. So earlier, if you had to, let's say, Selenium on your local book using webdriver, you would have to actually set up the browsers, the drivers, the page, and everything. But with Selenium Manager, I'm thankful to the awesome book by Bonie Garcia. This is all the free package with webdriver java and everything, so you can get it going into commands or maybe less. In addition to that, as I mentioned, there are nearby locators and also Seleniumgrid gets a make update where you can also use the bidi and other pieces to have a much more scalable great implementation.

[00:26:27] Joe Colantonio Love it! So definitely folks listening. We'll have a link to the book for sure. Robin, I know the book. I think it just came out the end of February, maybe March or early March, but have you gotten any feedback around this yet that you were surprised by or like, oh wow! I'm glad that helped you.

[00:26:41] Robin Gupta Very interestingly, a close friend who was not from test automation but from DevOps. He passed on some feedback when he could relate to those concepts, so it was a happy surprise. And second, going through the book, he mentioned that it actually delivers on some parts of that promise, that it doesn't assume that the reader know Selenium, know TestNG or these parts, even somebody who's from DevOps or development or is a citizen tester, they can go about reading the book and become acquainted, not an expert in Selenium.

[00:27:09] Joe Colantonio Absolutely. I'm going to make this one of my go to resources for people that ask me, hey Joe, I'm a manual tester. I know it's something that's a controversial term as well, but maybe let's just say someone that says, I want to learn more about automation. I can give them this book. All right, Robin, before we go though, is there one piece of actionable advice you can give to someone to help them with their Selenium automation efforts? And what's the best way to find or contact you, or get their hands on this book?

[00:27:32] Robin Gupta They can get the hands on the book from the website of Amazon or from my publisher. So if you go to amazon.com. Amazon.in, you can type Ultimate Selenium WebDriver for test automation, and you can get the book as a physical copy or e-copy. And the one key takeaway advice is that folks don't get afraid. A lot of people who I talk to the like this sounds complicated do have to learn about locators and HTML and whatnot. Don't be afraid. Fear is just the first stage, success is right after, so people focus on that.

[00:28:02] Thanks again for your automation awesomeness. The links of everything we value we covered in this episode. Head in over to testguild.com/a498. And if the show has helped you in any way, why not rate it and review it in iTunes? Reviews really help in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe, my mission is to help you succeed with creating end-to-end, full-stack automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

[00:28:38] Hey, thanks again for listening. If you're not already part of our awesome community of 27,000 of the smartest testers, DevOps, and automation professionals in the world, we'd love to have you join the FAM at Testguild.com and if you're in the DevOps automation software testing space or you're a test tool provider and want to offer real-world value that can improve the skills or solve a problem for the Guild community. I love to hear from you head on over to testguild.info And let's make it happen.