6 Best Practices to Consider For Selenium Automation

As the title suggests, this article will highlight a few of the best practices in Selenium that will help QAs enhance their Selenium tests.

Let’s get started.

1. Using the Right Locators

For testing the desired web elements of a particular application, QAs need to be proficient in using different locator strategies. After all, if the test scripts cannot identify the correct elements, the tests will fail.

Refer to this detailed guidepost on Locators in Selenium to understand different ways to locate web-elements and which locators are best suited for which situations.

2. Implementing Page Object Model

With ever-increasing customer demands, a website’s UI is bound to evolve after incorporating new changes at regular intervals. Needless to say, locators corresponding to specific UI elements change too. This means QAs need to create new test cases for the same page again, which can be tedious.

One can address this by using the Page Object Model design pattern for creating test scripts. This design pattern helps eliminate code duplication and also makes test maintenance more convenient. QAs can also reuse the existing code and make minimal changes.

3. Incorporating Wait Commands

Web browsers take some time to load individual web pages. The page load speed is subjective to network conditions, server issues, or system configurations. To deal with this, QAs often use the Thread.sleep() method, which is not the most efficient method.

In some cases, a website may take longer to load than the specified time. On the other hand, a website may load quicker than the specified time, resulting in slower test execution. A better, more efficient alternative is to use Implicit or Explicit Wait Commands in Selenium.

4. Running Selenium Tests on Real Devices

Although there are multiple emulators available on the internet for Selenium testing across platforms, running tests on real devices makes a considerable difference.

Emulators are just software programs that mimic the functionality of a device. They are more suitable for testing code changes in the initial stages of development. Besides, emulators for each device-OS combination may not be available, which makes it even more challenging for QAs to test on desired combinations.

Accurate results can only be expected when websites are tested in real user conditions. This allows teams to discover maximum bugs and eventually roll out a robust application.

Teams must leverage cloud-based platforms that offer a Cloud Selenium Grid for running tests on real browsers and devices. It empowers teams to run concurrent Selenium tests on desired device-browser combinations online.

5. Planning and Designing Test Cases beforehand

QA teams must have a proper test plan in place before getting started with automation. QA engineers must think about all logical scenarios and create extensive test cases from the end-users’ perspective. Diving straight into automation without a concrete strategy usually leads to bottlenecks in the latter stages.

Often, QAs focus more on verifying whether the scripts run successfully rather than planning for extensive test scenarios. This approach is ineffective for ensuring full-proof testing of web applications.

Selenium automation seeks to reduce manual testing efforts, increase execution speed, and identify the maximum number of bugs at the earliest. However, in order to get the most out of their Selenium scripts, QAs must follow the selenium best practices highlighted above. This will also help in establishing a reliable test cycle.