Tips and Tricks

Over the course of our Selenium testing, we’ve discovered a thing or two. Selenium has a lot of quirks (did we mention you can’t type y or full stops? Madness!) so here’s a list of tips and tricks to get you off to a flying start. It’s taken a while to figure these out so hopefully this will save you from the same issues.

Regular Expressions: You can use them! Put regexp:(Your Regex Goes Here) into value, or regexpi for a case-insensitive version. BUT! You cannot use /     / around your regex like you would expect to put around it in PHP or JavaScript normally. If necessary in the context of your regex it is possible to escape them with backslashes but the typical surrounding / / is not required.

Deleting Text: This should save you some time. typeKeys doesn’t like deleting, so we have a couple of options here. You can use three commands in a row: Key Down, Key Press, Key Up. Put them in that order and on all of them, put the value as \8, which is the ASCII code for backspace.

If you want to just delete a few characters, copy and paste the three commands as many times as necessary to cover it (each set of three will delete one character). If you want to clear a text field completely, use the type command (not typekeys) to overwrite the field with one character of your choice, and then use the three commands once to delete that.

Visibility and Hidden fields: Selenium can sometimes find things on your page even if you don’t think they’re there. This tends to happen when they’re in hidden fields. For example, a hidden form field will still trigger assertElementPresent. This is sometimes useful, but what is a man to do when he needs to test if something can’t be seen by the user? The answer is to use Visible rather than Present (so assertElementVisible for example). That sounds like common sense but it’s frustrating when you can’t figure it out so remember it!

Why pause?: Sometimes Selenium tries to go faster than it can actually… well, go. Half the time if something’s not working and you think it should be, it’ll be because the testing is moving onto the next step too fast. Don’t be ashamed to use pauses. Chuck them in everywhere if you have to. If auto-completes are involved, put half a second in between each command by default (sometimes you’ll need to bump that up to a second or a couple seconds).

Wrapping up

By now it should be immediately obvious to most developers that Selenium is useful on big projects with a lot of functionality, and if you’re managing a web project it’s something you should look into for your developers.

However, it’s important to note when and where Selenium is appropriate. On small projects it may not be worth the set up time, nor on projects that don’t have a lot of front-end functionality. If you want to test that your auto complete text field returns correctly for “Yemen” then you’re out of luck until they fix some of the problems.

There are drawbacks, but overall I’d really recommend Selenium to most developers to at least experiment with. Grab it and find what level of automation might work for your bug testing needs.

While Selenium isn’t a substitute for real people, it’ll go a long way to making sure the repetition of testing is as efficient as possible.

Lastly, I personally wouldn’t let it run on any military websites. Just in case it’s working for Skynet. But that’s just me.

Happy testing.

Obviously then, any tool which could help the bug testing process would be immensely useful. Enter Selenium. No longer just the active ingredient in Head and Shoulders Shampoo, Selenium is now an interesting way to test big web projects with a lot of functionality. It’s got a little bit of a learning curve but if used correctly it can dramatically shorten testing time on projects that require lots of input to test.

Seleni-what?

Dave first introduced me to Selenium a short while ago for use on a project, and after getting to grips with it we decided to share what we’ve learned and why we want to see more of Selenium in the future.

remote control your browser

To put it simply, Selenium is a tool for remote controlling your web browser. You give Selenium a list of things to do, broken down into small commands. It then does them for you, one by one, letting you know of any problems it encounters.

A list of commands is referred to as a “Test” which can be run individually, but the real power is in Test Suites. A Test Suite is a collection of tests, which Selenium will run through one by one at the touch of a button, effectively like using a robot to do all your tests for you in one go.

Once you’ve done the initial hard work of setting up what you want to test, all you need to do next time you update something is run your Test Suite to verify that everything still works. This is good because it enables you to make changes or updates and quickly verify whether that change has caused any problems. If problems do exist, they’re easier to identify because Selenium will highlight the command that failed, which you can run again and watch if you need to.

Gimme Gimme Gimme

The first thing you’ll need to do is download yourself Selenium IDE – It comes as a Firefox extension and you can grab it from the top of this page: http://seleniumhq.org/download/

Install it and it’ll be in your Tools section of Firefox. If you’re on a recent version of Firefox you may need to press F10 to make the tools menu appear.

You’ll then be presented with the Selenium window. Your tests go down the left hand side, and the commands (and any comments) can be entered on a test by test basis on the right hand side. Right clicking is your friend: Use it to add new tests (test cases) on the left and new commands or comments on the right.

A log of events, including errors can be found at the bottom of the window, as well as a reference that tries to explain what each command type is about. For the most part it does an average job, so I thought I’d compile the ones you will actually want to know about.

Useful Selenium Commands

Pause: Put a numerical value in milliseconds in the target section to execute a pause. More on this later, you’ll need it!

Click: Does what it says on the tin. Use it to select links, text areas, etc by specifying a target to click on. Target accepts css= as well as support for things like id= and name= without the need to specify that it’s css.

typeKeys: Target should be where you want to type (But always click there first if you can). Value is what to type. Do not use the letter y at any time. Full stops will also not work.

type: If you really, really need to use y or a full stop, you can use type to put them in. At your own risk. The type command is treated more like a stealth copy and paste and therefore won’t trigger things like auto complete menus or most JavaScript based on text input. Type will also overwrite anything currently in the text field.

waitFor: waitFor’s allow you to wait for something before doing something else. Immensely useful when waiting for auto completes to show up, or pages to load. waitForElementPresent is probably the best way to use this, but you can also wait for other things (e.g waitForTextPresent) or use NotPresent instead of Present to verify that something is not there.

assert: Think of asserts as your “End Goal”. If you’re testing whether an image comes up, you would use assertElementPresent and look for it. Like waitFor, you can assert for a huge number of things. All your tests should end with at least one assert which finally determines if the test has been a success.

runScript: If necessary you can call on scripting (such as jQuery you already have on the page) using runScript. Call your function in target.

That covers the most useful commands, but there are many more to try and play with, so I recommend that if this interests you, spend a little time getting to know the command menu and some of its options.

The next part of this article is available here.

HootSuite seeks to be the ultimate tweeting tool for businesses, and it has some interesting features on offer to accomplish that goal. We thought we’d take a closer look at HootSuite, what it is, what it isn’t and whether it could be a good solution for you.

In essence, HootSuite is a combination of tweeting/posting tools with an assortment of project management features. They range from the impressive to the not so impressive, so here’s a rundown of what you can get:

The More the Merrier:

Many people can manage one account. This has many uses, especially if your company maintains one company account or one big customer service account as opposed to lots of personal accounts.

Get Organised:

Set tasks for other members of your tweet team (e.g “Can someone respond to this customer”) and schedule automatic posts for certain times to make sure your account can still pump things out when you’re busy doing other things.

Syncing:

The obvious feature for almost all these apps lately is synchronisation across all your social accounts, including Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress and some things people don’t use so much anymore like Ping.fm. Personally I don’t rate this as a useful feature, mainly because for me, different social networks need different content. I wouldn’t post the same content on Twitter as a WordPress blog post or vice versa. Nonetheless, if you like cross-posting, you’re catered for here.

Local Knowledge:

Of potential benefit to some companies is language localization, currently offered in Japanese, Italian and French flavours. If you’re an international business with international needs, this could be useful.

Stat Attack:

Hootsuite offers the ability to track numerous things, including links clicked, keywords mentioned, facebook likes and follows. These stats can be assessed in real time or you can export some reports with fancy looking graphs for your next social strategy presentation to the board.

What’s the catch?

There’s always one. HootSuite hides it’s best features behind a paywall, with some of the most compelling additions like multiple team members to manage accounts and stat reporting eluding you unless you’re willing to cough up $5.99 a month and an extra $15 a month for every additional “team member”. An ad-supported, free version is available with the bare minimum.

If you listen carefully you can just about hear thousands of Android users spitting out their tea at the very mention of paying for an application. iPhone users may be more accustomed to opening their wallets for the sake of interesting apps, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that there are many good, free applications that offer social media functions and that makes HootSuite difficult to recommend to the majority.

Customer relations management:

If you’re an organisation looking to have a customer service team manage a support account or something of that nature, then you might find HootSuite to be a good investment as one thing it appears to do well is support groups of people tweeting.

If that’s not what you’re after then for now I wholeheartedly recommend TweetDeck, my go-to Twitter client.

You’d have to be stupid to write a blog post for your job where you say you don’t like your workmates. Fortunately, I don’t have to lie about it because everyone here is actually alright. The office is easy going and fun to work in which is one of the things I like best so far.

That’s not to say I haven’t done any work at all. In my almost-2-weeks so far I’ve worked on emails and sites for clients, acquiring more skills in HTML, CSS, and PHP while learning entirely new things like more complex WordPress management and version control through Github.

I expected to learn a lot and so far that’s been very true. You don’t necessarily realise how little you know until you’re staring at things your colleagues have written and you don’t have a clue where to start or what anything does.

Those same colleagues, in particular Matt, are the ones who come to my rescue when I get myself in such dilemmas as being unable to get my divs in the right place or struggling to get plugins working correctly. Thus far they’ve kept the laughter to a minimum at my rookie mistakes and I’m hopeful that over time I’ll reach the stage where Matt also can get his own work done rather than spending all his time correcting mine.

I’ve mentioned the office, but not yet in detail. As I said, the office is a good place to work. It’s light and spacious, miles away from the overbearing corporate enclosures you might be used to seeing on TV or in films (or at your own job if you’re not as lucky as I am). My chair leans back at a ridiculous angle and there’s a jar of skittles on the table a few feet away from me. What’s not to love about that?

It can actually be a bit crazy around here, between the oddball music selection, nerf guns and remote control helicopter attacks but at the end of the day everyone here is passionate about what they do and keen to get it done.

We’re located in Westbourne, which is about an hour commute for me to get here on time but would be a lot less than that if I could count on the buses to arrive on time. Never mind though, because Westbourne’s a nice place with some good places to get lunch and plenty of shops I’ve never been in but I’m sure are great. Perhaps more importantly than any of that, there are a few pubs all within walking distance.

I guess overall, what I’m trying to say is that Base is proving to be a pretty cool place to work so far. I’m looking forward to spending the rest of this 42 weeks improving my skills and working with some nice people on some exciting projects. And nobody paid me to say that. Unless you count the fact that I’m paid to be here in general. Anyway, I’m off to take on one of the less glamorous jobs – checking a site over before we put it up.

Catch you later, Base blog readers.