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One of the
key reasons
for doing
automated
testing is
to ensure
that time is
not spent on
doing
repetitive
tasks which
can be
completed by
tools
without
human
intervention.
Automation
could be one
of the most
effective
tools in
your toolbox
but it is
not a silver
bullet that
will solve
all the
problems and
improve
quality.
Automation
tools are
obedient
servants,
and as a
tester we
need to
become their
master and
use them
properly to
realize
their full
potential.
It is very
important to
understand
that
automation
tools are
only as good
as we use
them.
Converting
test cases
from manual
to automated
is not the
best use of
automation
tools. They
can be used
in much more
effective
ways.
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Creating robust and useful
test automation framework is
a very difficult task. In
the web world, this task
becomes even more difficult
because things might change
overnight. If we follow so
called best practices of
automation taken from
stable, desktop
applications, they will not
be suitable in web
environment and probably
will have negative impact on
the project's quality.
Many problems in the web
world are identical to one
another. For example
irrespective of any web
application we always need
to validate things such as
presence of title on all the
pages.Depending on your
context may be the presence
of meta data on every page,
presence of tracking code,
presence of ad code, size
and number of advertising
units and so on.
Solution presented in this
article can be used to
validate all, or any of the
rules mentioned above ,
across all the pages in any
domain / website. We were
given a mandate to ensure
that specific tracking code
is present on all the pages
of a big website. In a true
agile fashion, once this
problem was solved it was
extended and re-factored to
incorporate many rules on
all the pages.
This
solution was developed using
Selenium Remote Control with
Python as scripting
language. One of the main
reason for using tools such
as Selenium RC is their
ability to allow us to code
in any language and this
allow us to utilize full
power of standard language.
For this solution, a python
library called Beautiful
Soup was used to parse HTML
pages. This solution was
ported to another tool
called Twill to make it
faster. Since the initial
code was also developed in
Python, converting it to
Twill was a piece of cake.
Essentially this solution /
script is a small web
crawler, which will visit
all the pages of any website
and validate certain rules.
As mentioned earlier,
problem statement for this
is very simple i.e. “
Validate certain rules on
every webpage for any given
website ”. In order to
achieve this, following
steps were followed
1.Get Page
2. Get All the links
3. Get first link and if
link is not external and
crawler has not visited it,
open link.
4. Get Page Source
5. Validate all the rules
you want to validate on this
page
6. Repeat 1 to 5 for all the
pages.
It is worth mentioning
here that rules that can be
validated using this
framework are the rules,
which can be validated by
looking at the source code
for the page. Some of the
rules that can be validated
using this script are –
-
Make sure that title is
present for all the
pages and is not generic
-
Check the presence of
meta tags like keywords
and description on all
the pages.
-
Ensure that
instrumentation code is
present on all the pages
-
Ensure that every image
has an alternative text
associated with it
-
Ensure that ad code is
coming from the right
server and has all the
relevant information we
need.
-
Ensure that size of the
banners and skyscrapers
used for advertisement
is proper.
-
Ensure that every page
contain at least two
advertisements and no
page should have more
than four
advertisements, except
home page.
-
Ensure that master CSS
is applied on all the
pages for a given
domain.
-
Make sure that all the
styles are coming from
the CSS files and styles
are not present for any
element on a web page.
Above mentioned list might
give you some idea of what
can be achieved using this
approach. This list can be
extended very easily. It is
limited only by your
imagination :)
In the next article, we will
look at the code snippets
and explain how easily these
rules can be customized and
validated across all the
pages on any given domain.
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