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Once you have been using Selenium for a while and are comfortable writing test cases, you can focus on techniques and design principles to get your UI test automation to the next level.

This blog assumes you have been using Selenium and are comfortable writing test cases. You've already gone through the trial of inspecting DOMs to create your own XPaths. Maybe you are using the Page Object Model. By now you are probably pretty good at looking up solutions on the internet.

This 2-part blog is broken down into techniques and design patterns. Techniques are covered here in Part 1, and design patterns will be covered in Part 2 . You may already know all about some of these. That's fine, just skip to the sections that interest you. I'll be using Java here, but the techniques and practices should be generally applicable.

Better Locators

Bad locators cause spurious test failures. They waste time and distract from the intended function of the test. Bad locators typically rely on some unstable quality of the web page, whether that's a dynamic value or the element's position on the page. When those qualities invariably change, the locator breaks. Good locators just work. They correctly identify their intended element and allow the test to do its job.

The key here is to identify the qualities of the element that are stable, then choose the minimum subset of these qualities that uniquely identify that element to reduce your exposure to change. We all know absolute XPaths are bad, but it's good to understand exactly why.

/html/body/div[25]/div[2]/div/span/span[2]/div/h2/p

Take one subsection of this XPath: div[25]/div[2]. This represents the following qualities:

■ The node is somewhere in a div
■ That div is the second div
■ That div is directly within another div
■ That div is the 25th div

In this small subsection we have at least 4 qualities used to identify an element. If any of them change, our locator breaks. We have no reason to believe they will not change because none of them actually describe the element. Looking at this XPath, we couldn't even guess the purpose of the element.

Locators that reflect the purpose of the element are less likely to break. While the position or appearance of the element might change, its function should not. Ideally, you can guess what the element does by looking at its locator.

//p[contains(@class, "content")][contains(.,"Guidance for Success")]

With the above it's clear the element represents content that describes "Guidance for Success." Notice the class attribute, while usually used to control the appearance, also describes the element's function.

Often the unique, stable qualities of an element are not found in the element itself. Instead you will need to go to some relative of the element whose function is well described in the DOM. Take the above example in the "Guidance for Success" element. While this locator is good, copy text can often change, or may not be an option if the site supports multiple languages. Searching the DOM we might find that the parent div has a descriptive id. In that case, we might prefer a locator like:

//div[@id="success_guide"]//p

Explicit Waits

The temptation here is to set an implicit wait and hope that will handle most issues. The problem is this broad approach treats all situations the same without even addressing most problems associated with waiting. What if the element becomes present after a few seconds, but is not yet ready to be clicked? What if the element is present, but is obscured by an overlay? The solution is to use well-crafted explicit waits.

Explicit wait conditions take the form of:

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(webdriver, timeOutInSeconds)
wait.until(/* some condition is true */)

Explicit waits are powerful because they are descriptive. They allow you to state the necessary conditions in order to proceed. A common example of this is when the test needs to click an element. It is insufficient for the element to just be present; it needs to be visible and enabled. Explicit waits allow you to describe these requirements directly in the test. We can be confident the conditions have been met before the test attempts to continue, making your tests more stable:

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(webdriver, timeOutInSeconds)
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(element))

Descriptive explicit waits also let you write tests that focus on the behavioral aspects of the application. Because the application behavior does not change often, this allows you to create more stable tests. Given the example above, it's necessary for an element to be visible and enabled to be clicked, but it also needs to not be obscured by another element. If there is a large "loading" overlay covering your element, the click will fail. We can create an explicit wait that describes this loading behavior and waits for the necessary conditions to be met:

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(webdriver, timeOutInSeconds)
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.invisibilityOf(loadingOverlay))

ExpectedConditions

You may have noticed the ExpectedConditions utility methods being used in the above examples. This class contains a large number of helpful conditions to be used when writing your Selenium tests. If you haven't already, it's worth taking a moment to go over the full API. You will commonly use

ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(..) or ExpectedConditions.invisibilityOf(..), but you may also find uses for alertIsPresent(), jsReturnsValue(...), or titleContains(..). You can even chain the conditions together using ExpectedConditions.and(..) or ExpectedConditions.or(..).

Executing JavaScript

WebDrivers provide the ability to execute JavaScript within the context of the browser. This is a simple feature with incredible versatility. This can be used for common tasks, such as forcing a page to scroll to an element, as with:

driver.executeScript("arguments[0].scrollIntoView(false)", element)

It can also be used to leverage the JavaScript libraries used in an application such as JQuery or React. For example, you could check if the text in a rich editor had been changed by calling:

driver.executeScript("return EDITOR.instances.editor.checkDirty()")

The executeScript feature opens up the entire library API to your test. These APIs often provide useful insight into the state of the application that would otherwise be impossible or unstable to query using WebElements.

Using library APIs does couple your test to a library implementation. Libraries can often be swapped during the development of an application, so caution is required when using executeScript this way. You should consider abstracting these library-specific calls behind a more abstract interface to help reduce your tests' exposure to instability, such as with the Bot pattern (see more info in Part 2 of this blog).

Read Top Tips for Selenium Experts - Part 2: Design Patterns