Do You Make These 3 Common Selenium Automation Testing Mistakes?

Do You Make These 3 Common Selenium Automation Testing Mistakes?

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Software testing is essential to ensuring that the final product delivered is stable and meets the specifications. It is essential to test software products built by developers to guarantee they are of high quality. In light of the importance of software testing in the delivery of the final product, it is essential to include accurate, comprehensive test cases and a strong test strategy during the testing process. As a result, test coverage has a huge impact on the product that is delivered. Efficient and adequate test coverage cover all minute points and areas that are often overlooked.

Organizations always search for testers who can comprehend testing with precision and effectiveness in order to cover scenarios such as latency, security speed, and usability and in such cases Selenium automation testing proves to be quite useful.

This blog will talk about Selenium automation testing and how to avoid some mistakes in it in order to optimise the testing process.

What Is Selenium And What Are The Advantages It Offers?

Many testers across the world use Selenium as a popular testing tool. But what does Selenium testing really do, how do the different tools work, and what are the advantages?

In addition to being open-source and supporting most browsers and operating systems, Selenium is well known for providing testers with the option of automating in any programming language of their choosing.

Below are some of the advantages offered by the Selenium tool suite for test automation.

  • Selenium automates software testing at a high level.
  • The advantage of automated testing over manual testing is that it allows you to complete the tasks more quickly and with less errors.
  • Testing tools such as Selenium have become very popular since it is a free and open-source framework (making it accessible to everyone), and it enables skilled testers to automate many testing activities, including regression testing and functional testing.
  • According to the overview of Selenium tools, Selenium integrates well with a variety of business systems due to its ability to run on browsers, operating systems, and multiple languages.
  • Additionally, because it is open-sourced, the tool can be adapted to the user’s needs, and it has a large community of users from whom to learn.
  • There are no licensing costs with it, unlike most other automation tools
  • The source code of the program is open-sourced, so it can be extended and modified.
  • Various programming languages can be used with it
  • A wide range of operating systems are supported
  • A wide range of browsers are supported
  • Having a large user community gives it community support
  • The software offers a lot of integration options, including the ability to run parallel tests and make reports

Do You Make These 3 Common Selenium Automation Testing Mistakes?

QA teams often make mistakes because they want to automate more testing, and this costs money, time, and trust. Despite the fact that, according to the World Quality Report, Quality Assurance is now seen as a key driver of organizational growth, your team might be too nervous to try again after these blunders.

 

This list of three common Selenium test automation mistakes your team should avoid is a nice reminder that most of these mistakes are completely avoidable.

1.Handling Pop-Ups and managing scalability 

While pop-ups aren’t recommended over simpler alternatives, those who do use them still find it hard to write Selenium tests that handle them automatically. As a result of WebDriver, browser-based pop-ups can be handled, but OS-based pop-ups are beyond Selenium testing, making them one of Selenium’s biggest shortcomings. The request to keep a downloaded executable file is an example of a pop-up that isn’t based on a browser.

You can overcome Selenium’s shortcomings by integrating it with AutoIt, a capability for automating Windows-based UIs. Although Selenium does not support native OS-based dialog windows, you can use extensions to solve this problem. In Java, Jacob COM bridge may be a good way to connect Selenium and AutoIt depending on the language you are using to write the script.

However, Selenium’s biggest drawback lies in the speed at which it runs automated tests on a variety of browsers. Selenium’s limited resources mean that it can only run tests in a particular order with limited resources. As an alternative, you can run parallel tests as long as you have the resources.

2.You picked up a tool just because it was open source

There is no doubt that market preferences in this area are shifting, and open source is now widely accepted. You should consider other factors when selecting tools, but don’t let that be your primary criterion. Figure out what problem you want to solve first, and then look for the tool that will solve it the most efficiently, regardless of its license.

Generally, open-source tools require more technical skills. But, in most cases you won’t be able to call the vendor for help if it doesn’t work. Although open-source tools are attractive because they do not require licensing fees, they do come with some limitations. Some tools have limited functionality, so know what you need.

A commercial tool may be more appropriate for organizations that require more comprehensive reporting, or for organizations with high regulatory requirements. Be prepared to switch tools on a regular basis. Open source tools are more popular at first, then innovators start using them, and eventually they scale and need a solid commercial tool that can scale and doesn’t require all the support at first.

The commercial tools often enhance value as compred to open-source tools by filling in any gaps the open-source tools may lack. Many organizations use both open-source and commercial tools together.

When searching for a tool that meets your needs among the commercial and open-source options, you must identify the problem you wish to solve and the features you need. For example, given the skills of your users and the training and support they require, is open-source a good fit for them? Consider the tradeoffs between open-source and commercial options. As a final step, determine whether free community support will be available for the open-source community behind the tool.

In addition to being the fastest-growing cloud for cross-browser testing, LambdaTest is a cloud-based platform that offers live interactive manual and automated testing of web and mobile apps.. It provides support for different automation testing frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, Playwright and more. As part of the testing process, you will be able to take screenshots of your website on up to 25 different browsers and operating systems using just one session. You can even perform pixel-by-pixel comparisons between screenshots to see how they differ.

3.Dynamic Web Content, mobile testing and captcha 

Single-page web applications have become increasingly popular in recent years, keeping the structure and content fluid through the use of hidden elements or requests from the server on the fly.

Managing dynamic web content is one of Selenium automation’s biggest challenges. By using the explicit wait feature, Selenium solves this problem, which lets you set a predefined time for the automation testing process to wait for content to load. In addition, you can use the implicit wait feature, but results are usually unclear.

As a significant number of users consume content on their mobile devices, Selenium testing on mobile operating systems poses a challenge as a next challenge in responsive design testing. An Appium testing framework, part of the Selenium family, helps developers test native mobile operating system content. Appium automates mobile app testing by using WebDriver.

As a second challenge in Selenium testing across browsers, captchas pose a challenge. In Selenium, there is no inherent capability to solve captchas, so how do you deal with them? You typically use a captcha to ensure only real users navigate certain parts of your web application.

Creating separate testing environment variables is one way to solve this problem. You may choose one of these options when creating your web application’s testing environment:

  • Captcha module is disabled
  • Captchas with dummy values will be accepted
  • Use DOM structure to hide the captcha value

Regardless of the approach you take, ensure that it is only configured on the testing server; otherwise, you leave your web application vulnerable to bots.

How can an automated process be successful?

Automating can be made easier by keeping the following tips in mind:

  • Automating a simple process does not mean automating it as quickly as you would like. Taking baby steps towards automating is the key. You may start with an easy feature, but it may turn out that the final automated process is more complex than you initially thought.
  • Keeping things simple is important. You should avoid making it look complex by overdoing things.
  • Ideally, you should have a cross-functional team, with both testers and developers participating in the automation work. Each of the disciplines should work together to automate the project. As a result, everyone has a deep understanding of the project and is better equipped to handle any technical difficulties that may arise.
  • To avoid technical errors, take the time to understand the application that you wish to automate. Design it well, so that you will not make any mistakes.
  • Make sure you are asking clients and testers for feedback frequently to ensure that you are building the right product.
  • Consider factors such as the “maintenance” of the test suit when developing a code. Use proper coding standards and practices.
  • It requires testers to learn and adopt new skills, new tools, and technology as part of the automation process not only in terms of implementation and maintenance, but also in terms of integrating the automated suites with Continuous Integration (CI).

How to maximize automation success rates for QA team members?

Following are the ways through which you can maximize the automation success rates.

  1. Quality and quantity of work are the responsibility of each individual.
  2. Stay informed and learn as much as you can.
  3. The team leader should not dictate what you should do, every single day. You should be responsible for your work.
  4. Communicate, ask questions, raise red flags or issues immediately when they arise, regardless of whether you believe it is irrelevant, and don’t hesitate to communicate.

Final thoughts

It’s never too late to try again! You will never be able to keep up with agile development without test automation, even if you’ve had mixed results in the past. This is how you can lay the groundwork for a successful test automation strategy for your organization by looking at mistakes that have caused derailment in the past.

It is quite imperative to note that automation is the biggest bottleneck holding back the evolution of Quality Assurance and testing today. A new report predicted that automation, and particularly smart test automation, will transform the way QA and testing are conducted in the upcoming years. When it comes to reaping its benefits, you need a strategy and roadmap and that is what Selenium-based automation testing offers.

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