Manual and Automated Testing

There are mainly two broad types of software testing – Manual Testing and Automated Testing.
Manual Testing
Manual Testing involves testing the software without any automation script or any tool. Testers check the application or software by taking up the role of an end user. They try to find out if there is any unexpected behavior or failure in the application. Test Management can be taken care of by using test plans and test cases.

Automation testing

Automation testing process involves testing with the help of automation scripts and executing the scripts to run the application with the help of some automation tool. Once the script is ready then these tests can run quickly and efficiently.
Since the cost of automated testing is in the form of efforts and time required to create the scripts, not all tests can be converted to automated test. There should be a valid reason to pay that cost.
Reasons for Automation
1. Regression testing to confirm that new changes have not affected the application adversely. It considers already existing test cases for execution. This is an efficient process when we need to provide feedback to the developer immediately.
2. The test cases need to be iterated multiple number of times often with varying datasets to cover multiple workflow paths.
3. When we require support for agile methodologies.
4. Customized reports are required for monitoring.

Getting Started with Automated Testing

Once the need for automated testing has been established, it involves creation of relevant test scripts. Test script creation can be done only by a skilled testers having knowledge of testing, the suite of tools as well functionality under development. Such resources are costly and their time is a premium. Considering this fact, it is often not possible to budget the automation of all tests. Some of the major decision points while identifying cases for testing automation are
1. System modules where requirements do not change frequently
2. Ample time is at hand to describe a test via scripts
3. The application/software module is critical enough to justify the upfront cost of automation
4. After functional testing we want to do performance testing with multiple virtual users using the same test script.
With the scope of automation decided, next step is to pick the testing tool. The following checklist can help with the selection.
1. The tool should be able to easy to work with. It should execute test cases in unattended manner. It should provide interface to write scripts, efficient IDE and ease of test execution.
2. The tool should provide support to various technologies. It should support testing using different browsers, languages, and types of applications.
3. It should integrate with a software that does Application Lifecycle Management so that it can be used for running automated Build Verification Tests as well as the reports can be integrated with other reports created by ALM software

Automated testing frameworks

There are three automated testing tools namely Selenium, QTP (Quality Test Professional) and Coded UI Test (CUIT) .We will consider above mentioned main aspects of automation and see how these tools provide the support for each category.
Ease of Use
- Recording and Playback Functionality
Each of the testing tools has the ability of recording the actions and playback the recorded actions. Selenium provides the plug-in named Selenium IDE with Mozilla Firefox with which the actions can be recorded. QTP provides record button to record a new test. Recording for
- IDE and tools with which the tester can write the scripts
With Selenium IDE there is no special tool and specific technology to write the script. We can insert commands with ‘Table or Source View’ when required.
QTP provides Keyword View to display test steps graphically or Expert View which shows VB Script lines.
Selenium IDE comes as a plug-in with Mozilla Firefox. With this we can create a test suite which comprise of various test cases. With Selenium IDE is, you can convert recorded Selenium IDE scripts into different languages and after conversion you can run it in Selenium RC. Selenium RC has two components, one is “Selenium Server” and another is “Selenium Client”.
With QTP IDE for the first time 3 add-ins are provided ActiveX, Visual Basic and Web. Various links to best practices, new features for the current version are available with start page. We can either open existing test case or create a new one.
- Ease of Test Case execution
With Selenium IDE we have the option of executing the entire test suite already recorded or a test case at a time.
Depending upon the add-ins loaded in QTP IDE the record and run window shows tabs. Windows Application tab is always available. The tests can be executed with run button which in turn opens the run dialog box. We can specify the location for run specific results and provide parameters if any.
These tools can execute test cases without human intervention.

Comparison Between Selenium and QTP

Platform Support
-Language Support
Selenium uses Selenese, a high-level, cross platform language to write Selenium commands which is a domain specific language. There are 3 basic categories for the commands – named actions, accessors and assertions. To write tests there are a lot of programming languages like C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python or Ruby.
QTP scripts can be written with VBScript which is a high-level language with support to everything except polymorphism and inheritance.
- Support for various application types
Selenium supports only Web applications.
QTP supports almost any kind of applications.
Selenium scores fewer points in this regard as it supports only web application. QTP supports almost all kinds of applications

- Support for various browsers
Selenium supports all versions of IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera and a few more browsers.
QTP supports IE & Firefox. But both do not provide full cross browser support.
Selenium is the clear winner in this respect
- Support for Data Driven Testing
Selenium IDE supports xml data source using user extensions.
Data Driven testing is implemented as Excel workbook that can be accessed by QTP. There are 2 types of data sheet global and local. Global sheet is a single one which can be accessed from every action in a test. There can even be a local data sheet associated with every action.
- Exception Handling
Selenium IDE does not support error handling particularly unexpected errors (as it supports only HTML language). Selenium RC will provide support for it (it supports languages with .NET, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby).
QTP provides VBScript with the help of which we can use On Error statements.
- Validations or Assertions
Selenium assertions can be used in 3 modes assert, verify and waitFor. When an “assert” fails, the test is aborted. When a “verify” (Soft Assertions) fails, the test will continue execution, logging the failure. This facility can be used with TestNg framework. The “waitFor” commands wait for some condition to become true. They will succeed immediately if the condition is already true. However, they will fail and halt the test if the condition does not become true within the current timeout period.
For QTP there are checkpoints: to verify application under test. These are of 10 types – Standard, Table, Image, Bitmap, Database, Text, Text Area, Page, Accessibility, and XML. A checkpoint is a verification point that compares the current value with the expected value. If the current and expected value match it generates a PASS status otherwise FAIL status.
- Support for Objects
Object properties are not supported by Selenium. Selenium objects can be managed by using UI element user extensions. QTP comes with in-built object repository.
QTP objects have user friendly names.
Integration with Application Lifecycle Management and going beyond
- ALM Integration
Selenium being an Open Source software can be integrated with other Open Source products for Application Lifecycle Management like QMetry. This in turn can provide platform for software development lifecycle platform in the form of Atlassian Jira (project tracking tool), FogBugz or Bugzilla (bug tracking tool).
QTP being a part of Quality Centre it supports requirement traceability matrix. QTP integrates seamlessly with QC. Test management and mapping the manual testing process with automation becomes a lot easier with this integration
QC is still not complete life cycle management tool. It does not provide support for efforts management, build management or support to different process templates. It supports only test management, bug management and requirement management.
- Going beyond
Selenium being Open Source a lot of plugins available. Selenium IDE has plug-ins for customization, for adding new functionality to API, changing existing functionality.
QTP provided plug-ins for ActiveX controls, web application and VB objects. Other than these plug-ins for other objects like Microsoft .NET, multimedia plug-ins and Windows Mobile are also available. These QTP plugins available at an additional cost.
Each of the tools keeps on adding features as per need. Selenium being open source there are a lot of plug-ins.

Selenium WebDriver Training

What is Selenium Webdriver?

Webdriver is known to be the latest version of Selenium i.e. Selenium 2.x. More powerful than the primitive Selenium rc 1.x and comes with lots and lots of libraries and new features to work with. It’s not mandatory to know Selenium RC to work with Webdriver. You can directly learn webdriver and start working on it. There is no need of selenium server if you are working with Webdriver API

What makes it different from Selenium RC?

• More object oriented as compare to Selenium RC.
• Has wider range of APIs
• Interacts natively with browser where as Selenium RC is Javascript based.
• Can test Iphone and Andriod based application which is not supported by Selenium RC.
• Implements HTMLUnit driver which makes test execution really fast.
• Unlike Selenium RC there is no server in Webdriver.
• Supports almost all lastest web browsers where as Selenium RC does not works on latest versions on Firefox and IE.

WebDriver Architecture

Element Identification using Selenium WebDriver: Questions and Answers

1: What is the method used to launch URL using Selenium WebDriver?
Answer: In Firefox, we can set the homepage as the required URL as shown in the code below. This will launch the URL set in homepage on launching the driver.
FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.setPreference(“browser.startup.homepage”,“http://www.google.com”);
//We will provide the profile used as argument for Firefox Driver.
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);
In case, we do not want to use profile, we can use the get method to launch the URL.
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.get(“https://www.google.com”);
2: What is the difference between findElement and findelements method in Selenium?
Answer: To locate an element in the page, we use findElement method whereas findElements gives the collection of web elements in the Page.
Syntax for findElement is:
WebElement tableinfo = driver.findElement(By.className(“tableClsName”));
This will give the first element in the page with className as “tableClsName”. Now once the element is recognized, we can perform action on the WebElement. Suppose the element is a button, we can click on the button as shown below:
Tableinfo.click();
Suppose the WebElement is an input box, we can insert data in the input box as shown below:
Tableinfo.SendKeys(“This is a test”);
Syntax for findElements is:
List<WebElement> tabledata = tableinfo.findElements(By.tagName(“td”));
This will give collection of all elements in the page with className as “td”.
We can further work on the collection of the object and extract the required information or perform actions on the required webElement as shown below:
List<WebElement> tabledata = tableinfo.findElements(By.tagName(“td”));
for (int iCnt = 0;i<tabledata.size();iCnt++)
 {
String strData = tabledata.get(iCnt).getText() ;
If(strData.contentEquals(“this is the row”))
{
System.out.println(“Web Element Found”)
iCnt = tabledata.size()-1;
}
}
3: What are the value ways to identify an object in Selenium WebDriver?
Answer: Below are the various locators by which elements can be identified in Selenium WebDriver:
1. Id:  Identifies WebElement by the ‘Id’ attribute.
2. ClassName: Identifies webelement by the ‘class’ attribute.
3. cssSelector: identifies element based on the css of the webElement.
4. linkText: Identifies element by the actual text of the link. Text should match exactly with the link text.
5. Name: Identifies webelement by the ‘name’ attribute.
6. partiallinkText: Identifies element by the actual text of the link. The link is identified on partial match of text.
7. tagName: Identifies an object by the tagName of the webElement.
8. xpath: Identifies an object by the xpath of the object.

Selenium IDE: Interview Questions with Answers

1:  Explain the various features provided by Selenium IDE?
Answer: The layout of Selenium IDE is divided into following four areas:
1. MenuBar – Following are the menu options available in Selenium IDE:
 a.   File – Allows creating new test case, test suite, open existing test case, test suite, exporting tests to other formats.
 b.   Edit – Allows editing existing test steps, and adding new commands and comments.
 c.   Actions – Allows to record, play a test, execute command, toggle breakpoint and set entry point.
 d.  Options – Allows the changing of settings including set the timeout value for commands and specifying the format used for saving test cases.
 e.  Help – provides documentation for selenium IDE.
   2.  Toolbar – Provides buttons to manage test execution including test execution and test execution.
   3.  Test Case Pane – Test Case Pane shows the list of test case on the left and test steps in table or
source pane on the right. We can add/modify commands, target and value in the table for the test.
    4.  Log/Reference/UI-Element/Rollup Pane – This pane helps us to view logs of execution, reference explaining the selected command. We can also set to filter logs for info, warning, error and debug in this window.
 2: Explain what are the various items available from file menu
Answer: From the File Menu, We can perform various tasks
a.  Create New Test Case.
b.   Create new Test Suite.
c.   Save test cases and test suites.

1.    Export Test cases/test suites to various formats. E.g : Ruby/Python/java/c# with WebDriver or RC.
2.   Open existing test cases and test suites.

d.   Rename a test case.
3: Can the script prepared in Selenium IDE be used with webdriver/Remote control?
Answer: Yes, the script created in Selenium IDE can be exported to WebDriver/Remote Control in the languages java/c#/python/ruby that can be run using junit(java), RSpec(ruby), nUnit.
4: My Application is running slowly, can I change the default timeout value of recorder command?
Answer: We can reset the default timeout value for recorded command from Options Menu. By default the timeout is set as 30000 ms. In options, we can also define the recording settings and order of locator preference for object identification.
 5: What is the short cut key to create a new test in Selenium IDE?
Answer: The shortcut key to create a new test in Selenium IDE is Ctrl + N.
Some other useful shortcut keys in Selenium are:
Open a test – Ctrl + O :  Save a test – Ctrl + S  : Add test to test suite : Ctrl + D.
 6: What is the use of Select and find button in target in Selenium IDE?
Answer: On clicking on select, we can add the locator of an element in the page. Click on Select and click on an element in the page, the locator for the element will be added in the target. Find helps us to verify object exists in the page and highlights the object in the page if exists, else error is displayed in the log.

Design Patterns in Selenium

Before creating tests in Selenium, we should look for design patterns to be followed in the test. Defining Design pattern to be used in automation helps in easier maintenance of the project once the number of tests increases. Design Pattern should be used in such a manner that rework due to of any code changes are minimum, creating new test uses the existing code.
Following are a few strategies or design patterns used in Selenium for making tests easier to create and maintain:
1.       Page Object Model
2.       Using Page Factory in Page object
3.       Loadable components
When we write code for tests in Selenium, we can break down the code in such a manner that code maintenance is better. Suppose we have two tests. One tests for an image visible on home Page post login and another verifies welcome text post logging in the application. Writing the same code in two different tests will require code to be changed in two different places in case object property changes in login Page and at times in case we have large number of tests in the test suite, it will take considerable time to fix the automation code. We should refactor the code and create smaller private methods that are used in different tests.
So now, we can make change at one place and it will be reflected in many tests by refactoring the tests.
In Page Object Model, we create individual classes for each of the pages with all the methods pertaining to the Page. These methods specific to a page covers both positive and negative scenarios specific to page.
Page Object Model reduces the duplication of code, improves readability and increases robustness of the test. Also the code is lot more maintainable, which is specifically useful in case properties of objects in the application changes frequently.
Page Factory uses the factory class from web driver’s support library to define objects in the page in a better and simpler manner. We declare some fields on a PageObject that are Web Elements or List<Web Element>.initialize the page objects.
We can use Loadable components in the Page design providing a standard way of ensuring that pages are loaded successfully.
Together with this, we can use best practices to ensure the quality of code is highly robust, reusable and maintainable.

Locators In Selenium

Locators
Selenium uses what is called locators to find and match the elements of your page that it needs to interact with. There are 8 locators strategies included in Selenium:

• Identifier
• Id
• Name
• Link
• DOM
• XPath
• CSS
• UI-element

 Identifier
Works with the ID and name attributes of your html tags. Let’s consider the following example:
<html>
<body>
<form id=”login”>
<input name=”username” type=”text”/>
<input name=”password” type=”password”/>
<input name=”submit” type=”submit” value=”Continue!”/>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Valid locators for this snippet are :

• identifier=login
• identifier=username
• submit

Id
The Id strategy looks for an element in the page having an id attribute corresponding to the specified pattern. <label id=”my_id” /> will be matched by a locator like id=my_id or just my_id
 Name
Like the Id strategy, but on the name attribute. You can also specify a filter to refine your locator. Currently, there are two filter types :

• Value : matches elements with a name attribute and where the value follows a pattern. The following example illustrates the interest of filters :

• <html>
•  <body>
•    <div id=”pancakes”>
•      <button type=”button” name=”pancake” value=”Blueberry”>Blueberry</button>
•      <button type=”button” name=”pancake” value=”Banana”>Banana</button>
•      <button type=”button” name=”pancake” value=”Strawberry”>Strawberry</button>
•    </div>
•  </body>

</html>
Link
This strategy is intended to select links only and selects the anchor element containing the specified text: link=The text of the link
DOM
The DOM strategy works by locating elements that matches the javascript expression refering to an element in the DOM of the page.

• dom=document.div['pancakes'].button[0]
• document.div[0].button[2]
• dom=function foo() { return document.getElementById(“pancakes”); }; foo();

XPath
While DOM is the recognized standard for navigation through an HTML element tree, XPath is the standard navigation tool for XML; and an HTML document is also an XML document (xHTML). XPath is used everywhere where there is XML. Valid XPath locators can be:

• xpath=//button[@value="Blueberry"]: matches the Blueberry button
• //div[@id="pancakes"]/button[0]: same thing

CSS
The CSS locator strategy uses CSS selectors to find the elements in the page. Selenium supports CSS 1 through 3 selectors syntax excepted CSS3 namespaces

Commands In Selenium

Commands

The Selenium API defines dozens of commands that can be categorized into the following:

• Actions
• Accessors
• Assertions

 Actions

• Actions are commands that change the state of the application like clicking links or buttons, select an option in a <select> or type a character sequence in a given textbox.
• Actions are available in different flavors. For instance, click(locator) will trigger a click on an element locator but you can also find:
  • clickAndWait(locator) command which will trigger a click and stop the test until the browser has finished loading a new page.
  • clickAt(locator, offset) command that also triggers a click but takes another argument: a X and Y tuple that offset the actual clicking location by X and Y pixels.
  • A combination of the above : clickAtAndWait(locator,offset) that combines the specification of an offset for the click location and waits for a new page to load.

  test with actions
  ?
  type	id=search	Donuts near my home
  ?

  • type modifies the state of the application (it modifies a test field) and so is considered as an action

  Accessors

  • Accessors inspect the state of the application and store values in variables.
  • For instance, storeCookies(variableName) stores all the cookies in use in the current page in the variable variableName.
  • To use stored variables, the syntax is ${variablename} (or storedVars['variableName'] if in a JavaScript context):

    Test with variables
    store	my_search_string	searchString
    ?
    type	id=search	${searchString}
    ?

    and if in a JavaScript code section:

    if (storedVars['variableName'] == '') {
      ...
    }

   Assertions

  • Assertions are also able to inspect the current page but:
    • They are made to return a boolean value
    • This boolean represents the conformity of the element to a desired pattern
    • Usually, the pattern represents the state of an element.
  • Assertions come into 3 flavors:
    • assert : if assertion fails, test is aborted and marked as failed : assertTitle(pattern) will fail if the title of the page doesnot correspond to the pattern argument.
    • verify : if a verification fails, the test doesnot stop but a trace will be printed in the log.
    • waitFor : these commands pause the test until a condition is satisfied or a timeout is reached.

QTP vs Selenium

Features	Selenium	QTP
Cost	Open Source & Comfortable	User needs license for QTP which is very costly.
Efforts and Skill	User needs to have good amount of Java skill and more coding effort is required to implement the functions	It requires less effort to create a script, as it has a very good user friendly script development environment
Test Case	Termed as Testcase. Each Testcase has block of coding statements	Termed as Automation Script
Support for web browsers	Supports IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera	Supports IE & Firefox only
Support for File upload (system)	Not available	Supports all kinds of File upload
Database Support	With the help of DSN (ODBC32 Interface)	Requires Extensive Coding
Language Support	VBScript	Selenese, Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python, C#, Groovy
Technical Support	Since it is an open source, it has no official tech support	QTP offers very good technical support via phone, mail, web forum
Application Type	It can be used to test only web based applications	It can test web-based as well as desktop applications