Small Customisation for Capybara and Calabash

One of the biggest challenge in test automation is updating existing codes. Because of the update in the development, it is very prone to have some changes for the attributes of ui elements and less likely to have some change in behaviour in actions. The second option is most of the time called as bug, otherwise if the business is changed, it could be called as a new feature. For any reasons that cause the automation code gives failures you need to update something.

Sometimes I need to refresh my mind :)

For easy maintenance, one of the good approach keep your codes modular. It means that each module should responsible for one job and a update problem should be solved by applying just one change in your system. Using Capybara plus Cucumber gives you this features but if you are using them professionally. For this framework, business rules are kept on Cucumber so you can update business rules from your .feature files but related update should reflect to the code.

In this post I want to share a small but efficient customisation for accessing UI element. This change may be argued as against to Capybara soul but we are just playing with Ruby to enhanced Capybara's functions. Actually this idea is like Selenium Page-Object pattern but still BDD.

If we summarise the test automation in three words, it should be as follows: accessing element, performing actions and asserting result. These are the fundamentals of test automation. Accessing element can also be used for asserting result so I just write two new functions for finding element and asserting result as following:

The functions taking three parameters as accessing method can be by id, by css selector or xpath; second parameter is identifier for UI element; third parameter is optional and explains the behaviour of find function if there are more than one element with the given locator information.

We can call assert and find_by function as follow. With this way if there any update for accessing UI element we just need to update the ids.rb module.

One of the question may arise as 'we are just using id for each element and we will not need this' but even you are using ids for every element you may sometimes need to access some dynamic element with css or xpath. Even there is no need to access dynamic UI element it is a good practice to store ids in a different module for keeping them updated. This approach we will efficient if you are automating regression test cases for completed project.

Selenium Error "Element is not currently interactable and may not be manipulated"

Selenium webdriver can drive different browsers like as Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer. These browsers actually cover the majority of internet users, so testing these browsers possibly covers the 90% of the internet users. However, there is no guaranty that the same automation scripts can work without a failure on these three browsers. For this reason, automation code should be error-prone for the browsers you want to cover. The following error is caught when the test script run for Chrome and Internet Explorer, but surprisingly there is no error for the Firefox. Selenium gives an error like below: Traceback (most recent call last): File "D:\workspace\sample_project\sample_run.py", line 10, in <module> m.login() File "D:\workspace\ sample_project \test_case_imps.py", line 335, in login driver.find_element_by_id("id_username").clear() File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.35.0-py2.7.egg\seleni...

Change Default Timeout and Wait Time of Capybara

One of the biggest challenge for automation is handling timeout problem. Most of the time, timeout is 60 seconds but it may sometimes not enough if you have badly designed asynchronous calls or the third party ajax calls. This makes handling timeout more complex. set large enough to tolerate network related problems. For Selenium based automation frameworks, like Capybara, default Webdriver timeout is set to Net::ReadTimeout (Net::ReadTimeout) Changing ReadTimeout If you have timeout problem for Capybara, it gives an error like above. This means that the page is not fully loaded in given timeout period. Even you can see that page is loaded correctly but webdriver wait until the Ajax calls finish. class BufferedIO #:nodoc: internal use only def initialize (io) @io = io @read_timeout = 60 @continue_timeout = nil @debug_output = nil @rbuf = '' end . . . . . def rbuf_fill beg...

Create an Alias for Interactive Console Work: Selenium and Capybara

If you are working on shell most of the time Aliases are very helpfull and time saving. For testing purposes you can use Alias for getting ready your test suites. In this post, I want to explain both running Selenium and Capybara on console and creating aliases for each. This post is for Windows machines, if you are using Unix-like see this post . Creating Scripts for Selenium and Capybara First of all, it is assumed that you have installed Selenium and Capybara correctly and they work on your machines. If you haven't installed, you can see my previous posts. I am using the Selenium with Python and the Capybara with Ruby. You can use several different language for Selenium but Capybara works only with Ruby. Create scripts in a directory called scripts (in your home folder, like as ~/scripts ) for your automation tool as following, save them as capybara.rb, sel.py : Creating Aliases Depends on your favourite shell, you need to add the al...

Page-Object Pattern for Selenium Test Automation with Python

Page-object model is a pattern that you can apply it to develop efficient automation framework. With the page-model, it is possible to minimize maintenance cost. Basically page-object means that your every page is inherited from a base class which includes basic functionalities for every page. If you have some new functionalities that every page should have, you can simple add it to the base class. Base class is like the following: In this part we are creating pages which are inherited from base page. Every page has its own functionalities written as python functions. Some functions return to a new page, it means that these functions leave the current page and produce a new page. You should write as much as functions you need in the assertion part because this is the only part you can use the webdriver functions to interact with web pages . This part can be evaluate as providing data to assertion part. The last part is related to...

Performance Testing on CI: Locust is running on Jenkins

For a successful Continuous Integration pipeline, there should be jobs for testing the performance of the application. It is necessary if the application is still performing well. Generally performance testing is thought as kinds of activities performed one step before going to live. In general approach it is true but don't forget to test your application's performance as soon as there is an testable software, such as an api end point, functions, and etc. For CI it is a good approach to testing performance after functional testing and just before the deployment of next stage. In this post, I want to share some info about Jenkins and Locust. In my previous post you can find some information about Locust and Jenkins. Jenkins operates the CI environment and Locust is a tool for performance testing. To run the Locust on Jenkins you need command line arguments which control the number of clients , hatch rate, running locust without web interface and there s...

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