Sunday 20 November 2016

Selenium Automation Framework

Selenium automation is one of the biggest favourite for automation testers. One of the key factor to deliver the automation work is to build the required framework which will reduce the time to maintain the automation scripts.

Lets find out what is Selenium automation framework in this post.

Selenium Automation Framework is setting standards to make the development, maintenance and operations simple. In other words any one who wants to run the scripts and analyse the results should not see any complexities in operations. All the complexities will be hidden in a logic and the libraries.

The first step is to find out about the application feasibility. This is very essential, remember Selenium works only with web applications and any windows based alerts will not be handled using webdriver. Autoit kind of tools are required to handle such alerts. So for any project to be successful the feasibility  study is must.

Next important step is to study the application flow. Straight forward steps and exceptional steps will be noted down and segregated. The requirement of test data for the steps are identified. Such data is more and follows the same steps each time then we will start thinking about data driven automation. Data driven steps are identified if certain type of data decides the flow and with all different sets of data the same steps are executed which results in different sets of outcome requires data driven framework.

We also need to decide how the reporting should be done. Most simple reports are biggest advantage of framework however they are most complex to build in many cases. The tools for reporting like TestNG and Junit are widely used. However if you have enough time and demand for some specific reports then HTML reports are very useful.

Now we know the framework for the project and reporting needs. We can start building library functions. These functions are as simple as opening client site, clicking on button and entering data in text field. The basic control should be targeted first.

Another important step is to create the driver and decide how do you want to call the scripts. All the library functions and client scripts should take values from property files only. This way we can make sure that the same function can be used for different operations.

Hope the above information gives basic idea of the selenium automatio framework. I will be waiting to hear from all of you.


Happy framework designing.

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