Learning Web UI Automation

Week 1

In this week we are going to learn the basics of test automation. This will then lead us into the first item of how we can go about finding elements on the page.

• Competencies
  • Basic rules for test automation
  • How to locate elements on the page
    • ID Selectors
    • Name Selectors
    • XPath Selectors
    • CSS Selectors

Week 2

In this week we are going to learn how to interact with elements on the page. This will use all the information we learnt in the previous week to see about clicking on buttons, typing into text boxes and other elements on the page

• Competencies
  • How to interact with elements on the page
    • Typing into Text boxes
    • Using Selects
    • clicking buttons and links

Week 3

More sites  are using AJAX to create a more desktop feel within Web Applications. This has brought some interesting challenges to Web Automation. THis week will see how we can overcome this issues and have tests that work with little effort against AJAX sites

• Competencies
  • Waiting for Elements to appear on the page
  • Waiting hidden elements to change state
  • Waiting for text to appear

Week 4

Sometimes there are elements on the page that change all the time however the fit a certain pattern. This could be dates or messages to the user with their name. We then can use this information as part of our tests to check the page is formated correctly.

• Competencies
  • Using Globbing in tests
  • Using Regex in tests
  • Using exact messages

Week 5

This week we will be looking at using JavaScript with our tests. The central code base of Selenium is written in JavaScript so that it can work in multiple browsers. Using JavaScript in our tests can mean that we can access APIs on the page to fire off calls. We can also tell it to fire off events in the DOM like click and focus and blur.

• Competencies
  • Firing off Events
  • Accessing the DOM on the page
  • Accessing JavaScript Functions on the page

Week 6

To finish off the course we are going to be looking at how we can make your tests maintainable by everyone not just the developer who created them.

• Competences
  • Naming of tests to see what they do at a glance
  • Page Object model for breaking tests up