02: Dave Haeffner : The Selenium Guidebook

01 March 2014 at 12:20 AM

By Test Guild

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:

Test Parallelization,
Reporting,
Simple command line wrapper,
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