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Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices
Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices: Build a powerful, stable, and automated test suite using Selenium WebDriver

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Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices

Chapter 2. The Spaghetti Pattern

 

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

 
 --Martin Golding

Writing and maintaining any form of software is like fighting entropy; given enough time and changes, any code base will gradually decline into disorder. A test suite is a closed system; if you do not provide energy in constant upkeep and planning, the suite will deteriorate and will fail constantly. Every new feature and line of code added to our website makes our test suite obsolete. The only way to fight back these natural forces is to constantly upgrade and improve existing tests.

In this chapter, we will start to grow our test suite organically and take a look at an anti-pattern called the Spaghetti pattern. Along the way, we will pick up some more basic skills, such as using XPath and CSS selectors to locate the elements on a web page.

Note

The term anti-pattern was inspired by a great...

Introducing the Spaghetti pattern

In automated test projects, the Spaghetti pattern development is characterized by lack of perceived architecture and design. This style of test development evokes an image of bowl of spaghetti, where each strand of spaghetti can represent a single test or multiple tests intertwined so tightly together that it becomes difficult to tell one apart from another. Furthermore, it is close to impossible to understand anything at a glance without spending time fishing out and untangling each individual strand of spaghetti from the bowl.

Tests in this pattern not only depend on the execution order of all the tests, but also tend to over-share internal private components with each other. The run order is important because each test is not self sufficient and independent, and thus needs previously run tests to set up the test environment. For example, a login test requires the registration test to successfully register a new user, instead of having an existing user...

Testing the product review functionality

Our website, like many other modern websites, allows users to leave positive and negative feedback on a given product. Higher-rated comments on any given product can provide a much needed boost in sales. As with any situation involving monetary incentives, someone will try to game the system and make money in the process. So, aside from the ability to leave a comment, our website has a rudimentary fraud prevention system. It will prevent any suspiciously duplicate comments/ratings from being added to any product.

It is now our task to test both of these features. So, let's explicitly state the target goals of the tests we will now implement:

  • As a website user, I should be able to leave a product review for any product, and the resulting review should be immediately visible on the product's page
  • As a fraudulent user, I should be prevented from posting duplicate product reviews on our website

Starting a product review test

Let's start off...

Reasons for failures

We finished our two tests and we should now examine just how fragile they are. Even though the design of our tests made sense at the time of writing them, they will fail at the slightest provocation. Let's imagine a couple of real-life situations.

The sales team decided that having to change the amount of exclamation marks in the name of the product. These little tweaks happen all the time. We won't change the actual website, but we will change our test to expect a different amount of exclamation marks in the assertion. This will provide a sufficient discrepancy between the test and reality to make the test fail.

Note

You can download the full test code from http://awful-valentine.com/code/chapter-2.

Let's change the assertion in test_add_new_review to look like this:

Reasons for failures

Running the tests will now give the following output:

Reasons for failures

Let's do a postmortem of our tests and list several bad mistakes:

  • Test on test dependence: This is the most obvious test. If the first...

The Chain Linked pattern

The Chain Linked pattern is an improvement on the Spaghetti pattern. Unlike the bowl of spaghetti, an outstretched length of chain can characterize this pattern. Each link in the chain is an individual test and is an entity on its own. Even though each test is self contained and does not share too much with its neighbors, it still relies on a rigid order of execution. Most tests in this pattern rely on previous tests to set up the environment to be just right. This pattern is a huge improvement on the Spaghetti pattern in its long-term maintainability; however, since the whole test suite needs to be executed every time, it is neither efficient nor easy to use. In conclusion, the Chain Linked pattern might not be the best way to approach writing a test suite. However, it is an overall improvement over the Spaghetti pattern, since it segregates individual tests into more or less self-contained units.

The Big Ball of Mud pattern

Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder first popularized the Big Ball of Mud in their self-titled paper. Unlike the Spaghetti pattern, where the test suite can be separated into individual strands, Big Ball of Mud does not have any formal structures that will allow a distinction between any individual components. Test data and results are promiscuously shared amongst most distant and unrelated components until everything is global and mutable without warning. Unintentional test failures occur when a component is changed for a new test without the realization that hundreds of other tests depend on it. To exacerbate the problem, there is no easy way to find all of the interdependencies since everything is merged together like a piece of wet clay.

Adoption of this pattern is usually unintentional and stems from being developed over long periods of time with different individuals working on different pieces without any overall architectural plan. The initial success of just...

Introducing the Spaghetti pattern


In automated test projects, the Spaghetti pattern development is characterized by lack of perceived architecture and design. This style of test development evokes an image of bowl of spaghetti, where each strand of spaghetti can represent a single test or multiple tests intertwined so tightly together that it becomes difficult to tell one apart from another. Furthermore, it is close to impossible to understand anything at a glance without spending time fishing out and untangling each individual strand of spaghetti from the bowl.

Tests in this pattern not only depend on the execution order of all the tests, but also tend to over-share internal private components with each other. The run order is important because each test is not self sufficient and independent, and thus needs previously run tests to set up the test environment. For example, a login test requires the registration test to successfully register a new user, instead of having an existing user...

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Description

Selenium WebDriver is a global leader in automated web testing. It empowers users to perform complex testing scenarios with its simple and powerful interface. This guide will provide you with all the skills you need to successfully create a functional Selenium test suite. Starting from the very beginning of the Selenium IDE, this book will show you how to transition into a real programing language such as Ruby or Java. You will quickly learn how to improve your code quality with refactoring and the skills needed to plan for the future development of your website to future-proof your test suite. With ample test examples running against a life-like e-commerce store and detailed step-by-step code review and explanations, you will be ready to test any challenge web developers might throw your way. This book is intended for anyone who wants to create a test suite that is easy to maintain by expanding your knowledge until you feel truly confident and comfortable with Selenium.

What you will learn

  • Control Selenium WebDriver within any major programing language such as Java, Ruby, Python, and .NET
  • Learn how to implement a simple test script or a complex Page Objects framework
  • Set up each test to automatically deal with AJAX and jQuery
  • Remove test instabilities by blocking thirdparty services
  • Deal with data uncertainties by using fixtures, JSON APIs, and API stubbing
  • Improve your test suite continuously by refactoring code and using the DRY principle
  • Stabilize your tests by using patterns such as the Action Wrapper and Black Hole Proxy patterns
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Publication date : Sep 23, 2014
Length: 270 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781783982707
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Table of Contents

10 Chapters
1. Writing the First Test Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. The Spaghetti Pattern Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Refactoring Tests Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Data-driven Testing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Stabilizing the Tests Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Testing the Behavior Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. The Page Objects Pattern Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Growing the Test Suite Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
A. Getting Started with Selenium Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.9
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Josiah D. Weaver Nov 13, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
About time someone published something easy like this! I've been searching youtube and google for the last year trying to build a test environment! There's a lot of guys out there who are willing to help you out while building, but it's nice to finally be the guy people ask! This book really kicks things off from the ground up, teaching you a ton of the underlying concepts to get you building and testing pronto! Couldn't put it down my first week!
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Felipe da Silva Jan 11, 2020
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Good book.
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Dragan Nikolic Aug 13, 2015
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Great book for learning Selenium and Ruby, and what is even more important for learning best test automation practices along the way.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Yev Nov 23, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
To begin with, in my opinion this book is for more experienced developers who are ready to take Selenium testing to the next level.I’ve been exposed to programming for about 2 years, starting with Ruby and currently learning some Java. While this book focuses primarily on using Ruby as the preferred language, have no doubt that Selenium can be used with Java as well.One of the strongest points of this technical book is that the author can convey advantages as well as disadvantages in a clear and concise manner. I have found that this helps greatly to see what is important and seeing possible downsides to a chosen path.Through showing us how software testing works from the first chapter, the author leads us through various examples and patterns in the current world of testing. It is up to date and includes relevant information now in 2014.In addition to explaining testing with the Selenium suite, the author also focuses on code reuse and refactoring, which will further help you grow as a programmer/developer. In Chapter 4, he also explains in depth test data and the various nuances associated with it.As the author states, you should be able to follow along the examples in this book with relative ease, but if you can’t the appendix will help you with setting up Ruby on your computer, how to use the command line interface, installing the Selenium Webdriver gem, as well as getting it to work in Firefox. His examples are honed by years of experience in software testing, so everything is explained as simply as possible for a beginner or an experienced developer. The screenshots will help you immensely to see what the author means and overall, will provide for an enjoyable experience reading this software testing book.I have found that this book not only taught me about Selenium testing, but also broadened my knowledge about Ruby programming as well as browser elements and using the Selenium plug in to the fullest in Firefox. There is much to be learned about the browser locator in Chapter 2 as well, which I highly recommend to review.In the test data chapter, the author clearly and concisely explains to the reader what kinds of data is available and the benefits/disadvantages of each. What I really liked is that the author touches on topics about BDD, Rspec, as well as Cucumber and CI tools.In conclusion, I would highly recommend this guide to anyone already testing or looking to start testing in the open source tool that is Selenium. In addition, you will learn many helpful tips for software development in general, like I have. I look forward to any future works by this author.
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Janette Rounds Oct 12, 2019
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Very basic introduction. Not that good for experienced test automators. Nothing was wrong or invalid, I just was hoping for something more advanced that covered more modern trends in test automation.
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