July 05th, 2024 | Credo Systemz | Career Insights

Introduction

In the web development field, Selenium is a powerful framework for automating web browsers. It is widely used for testing web applications across the globe. This article guides the beginners for leveraging Selenium effectively. The five essential best practices of Selenium are:

• Use Explicit Waits
• Locate Elements Strategically
• Maximize Test Reliability
• Optimize Test Execution
• Maintain Test Code Quality

Use Explicit Waits

To improve execution speed, use explicit waits as selenium interacts with web pages at varying speeds. Using explicit waits to synchronize your test with the application’s state. It ensures that your automation script waits for specific conditions to be met before proceeding.

Example in Python:

Locate Elements Strategically

Efficiently locating elements is crucial for robust automation scripts. Prefer efficient locators like IDs, names, CSS selectors for better performance. Use stable and specific locators to avoid flakiness. Avoid relying solely on XPath or overly generic selectors like find_element_by_xpath(“//input”):

Maximize Test Reliability

Ensure the tests are reliable and deterministic by designing them to handle different scenarios, such as page reloads, AJAX calls, or timeouts. Implement the Page Object Model to organize your code that separates the design pattern and test logic from the UI structure.Implement robust error handling and logging to diagnose failures effectively:

Optimize Test Execution

Improve test execution speed by leveraging headless browsers for

• Faster tests
• Parallel tests
• structuring the test suite efficiently.

Use Selenium’s Alert interface to handle JavaScript alerts. Ensure the tests can interact with these pop-ups appropriately.

Maintain Test Code Quality

Adopt good coding practices such as