Introduction
Digital revolution has accomplished the ease of doing business as businesses have become faster, easy to operate and efficient. However, different website actions such as clicking on various options, downloading files etc., demand time, and often they are prone to errors.
In this context, many organizations have started looking for tools that can automate different online processes. For instance: clicking buttons, logging into the website for downloading files, getting content from a web page and transferring data between applications etc.
The idea behind web automation is to allow the software to perform various web browser tasks or web applications.
Website Test Automation
Automation testing helps businesses to reduce the large amounts of monotonous and repetitive human tasks. Today, many web-apps are making their ways on the Internet. These web-apps are accessible through the interface of different kinds of browsers like Firefox and Chrome. However, cross-browser testing tools are necessary to develop browser-friendly web-apps.
A right automation framework can automate repetitive browser actions without an actual requirement of the manual interface. This way, automation helps to save time and increase efficiency.
Why do you need website test automation?
This a million-dollar question! Well, you need website test automation for the following reasons:
- Quick Assessment: A quick assessment/response helps locate potential bugs quickly that saves time. It can improve communication among various stakeholders, viz. developers, testers and designers etc.
- Enhancing test efficiency: Setting up the test automation framework takes quite a time, but it’s essential to understand that each test ratifies various features and functions. As running automation doesn’t require much time, so the execution becomes quicker. While automated tests are going on, testers can work on other tasks and evaluate test results in the end when all the test cases are executed.
- Saving project cost: Automated tests enable overall test coverage in a short period. It will remarkably reduce the number of bugs appearing post-release, thereby ensuring the quality product’s delivery. It, in turn, reduces overall expense by saving project cost.
- Reusing test cases: Automation with its repetitive features enable reuse of test cases. It then becomes easier for software to be tested entirely once again when new patches develop.
How to get started with website test automation?
Selenium is an open-source framework mainly used for automated website testing. However, following are the steps to get started with website test automation by using the framework provided by Selenium:
1. Start by creating WebDriver instance
To start writing a Selenium test script, initiate the WebDriver interface. For that to happen, one must create the instance of WebDriver interface with the help of a specific web browser’s constructor.
2. Navigate to a web page
By invoking the get method of the WebDriver interface, you can navigate to a specific web page that needs to be tested.
3. Locating web elements on the web page
To perform the desired operations, you need to interact with the web page first. The findElement method is usually referred to as locate elements on the web page.
4. Acting on an HTML element
After identifying the desired element, it’s time to interact with them using interaction methods.
5. Anticipating the browser response to the action
Till this step, you must have performed your desired operation. Now you have to wait for the server response. It will not go beyond a second or two. However, generating a server response requires the programming of the waiting time in the test scripts.
6. Running tests and recording test results using a test framework
This step is very crucial. You can run tests in an automated test script without the need for any human interaction. Running tests will evaluate function and performance.
You can record the test results with the test framework’s support or by logging framework for the programming language.
7. Concluding the test
And here is a final step. By invoking the quit method on an instance of the WebDriver interface, you can conclude a test.
