Selenium Tool Implementation Misc Questions

Question 1:

How do I implement data driven testing using Selenium?

Answer

Selenium, unlike others commercial tools does not have any direct support for data driven testing. Your programming language would help you achieving this. You can you jxl library in case of java to read and write data from excel file. You can also use Data Driven Capabilities of TestNG to do data driven testing.

Question 2:

What is equivalent to test step, test scenario and test suite in Selenium.

Answer

If you are using Java client driver of Selenium then TestNG test method could be considered equivalent to test step, a test tag could be considered as test scenario and a suite tag could be considered equivalent to a test suite.

Question 3:

How do I get attribute value of an element in Selenium?

Answer

You could use getAttribute method

With Selenium 1.0 –

        String var = selenium.getAttribute("css=input[name='q']@maxlength");

        System.out.println(var);

With Selenium 2.0 –

String var = webDriver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input[name='q']")).getAttribute("maxlength")

        System.out.println(var);

Question 4:

How do I do database testing using Selenium?

Answer

Selenium does not support database testing but your language binding does. For example while using java client driver you can use java data base connectivity (jdbc) to establish connection to data base, fetch/write data to data base and doing data comparison with front end.

Question 5:

I completed test execution and now I want to email test report.

Answer

If you are using “ant” build tool then you can use “mail” task to deliver your test results. Similar capabilities are available in Continuous Build Integration tools like – Hudson.

Question 6:

How do I make my tests more comprehensible?

Answer

Selenium tests which are written as –

        selenium.click("addForm:_ID74:_ID75:0:_ID79:0:box”);

Make it tough to understand the element which is being exercised upon.

Instead of hard coding element locator in tests you should externalize them. For example with java you can use properties file to contain element locators and then locator reference is given in test script. Following this approach previous test step would look as –

      selenium.click(PolicyCheckbox);

And this is far more comprehensible.

Question 7:

Why should I use Page Object?

Answer

Page object is a design pattern which distinguishes the code carrying out operations on page and code which carries out tests (assertion/verification). While implementing page object you abstract functioning of a page or part of it in a dedicated “Classs” which is then used by test script to perform actions on page and reach a stage when actual test could be performed.

Advantage of using page object is the fact that if application lay out changes then you only need to modify the navigation part and test would function intact