Four Tips for Web Automation

This deck covers a talk on UI web automation; specifically, focusing on four areas to improve your tests' quality: good locators, implicit and explicit waits, and backing APIs.

From my talk at StarEast 2013. You can find the sample code at https://github.com/jimholmes/SE13

Updated for my presentation at SQADays-14 in Lviv, Ukraine on 7 Nov 2013.

Transcript

1. Four Crucial Tips for Web Automation
2. Jim Holmes
   jim@falafel.com
   @AJimholmes
   FrazzledDad.com
3. Slides:
   frazzleddad.com
   ! Samples:
   github.com/JimHolmes/SE13
5. The Four Tips
   
6. 0) Learn What To Automate
   
7. (And what NOT to)
   
8. 1) Learn Your Locators
   
9. (And When to Avoid Them)
10. 2) Learn How Async
    Works in Your System
11. 3) Learn to Handle Data and Configuration Effectively
12. Automation Best Practices
    
13. There’s only one:
    
14. There are no best practices!
15. Take today’s concepts
16. Learn how to apply in
    ! YOUR SYSTEMS!
17. Today’s Demos: We’ll test ! The Internet!
18. the-internet.herokuapp.com ! github.com/tourdedave/the-internet
19. 0) What to Automate
20. What NOT to
21. 1) Locators
22. What’s a DOM?
    
23. Locator Types
    IDs
    CSS
    Xpath
    Other Attribs
24. When to AVOID
    Locators
25. 2) Handling Async Situations
26. Page load lifecycle
27. Along came AJAX
28. And Jquery and backbone and…..
29. Explicit waits
30. 3) Use backing APIs
31. Simplify Your Tests via Setup & Teardown
32. Test Oracles
33. System Configuration
34. Learn the concepts
35. Learn how to apply in
    ! YOUR SYSTEMS
36. Jim Holmes
    jim@falafel.com
    @AJimholmes
    FrazzledDad.com