Automation Testing

Automation Testing is an automatic technique where the tester writes the scripts using an automation tool to execute test cases and test the software. The main goal is to increase the efficiency and develop the quality of the software. It increases the test execution speed, saves time and cost, and maintains good consistency. For automation testing widely used software is Selenium. Selenium is open source and is handled by google. But there is one major drawback with selenium that we can automate only web applications with Selenium. Selenium supports 14 different languages such as java, python,c#, etc.

The architecture of Selenium java language binding:

The super most interface is search context which is extended by webdriver. Webdriver interface is implemented by Remotewebdriver class. Remote webdriver class executes other interfaces also javascript executor, takes screenshots, etc. All the browser-specific classes such as chrome driver, and firefox driver extends the remote webdriver class.

Locators in Selenium:

As part of automation, selenium performs actions on the page by identifying HTML elements. Locators are the way to identify HTML elements on a web page. Selenium webdriver uses many of the below locators to identify the elements on the page and perform actions:

1.Id 2.Xpath 3.CSS Selector 4.Name 5.Class Name 6.Tag Name 7.Link Text 8.Partial Link Text

Of the given locators most important is Xpath. It is a path of an element in an HTML tree. While writing XPath it starts with . which also represents the current webpage or HTML document. Using . is not mandatory we can also navigate from parent element to child element using single /.

Syntax:driver.findElement(By.xpath("/html/body/a")).click();

Conclusion:
 

Automation testing improves the test coverage and one of the best tests to test stable modules. Automation testing reduces debugging time and also resolution time as it runs test in continous pipeline and also provides team faster feedback. But for an organization to start automation testing it needs effective roadmap,robust framework for an automation tool, and the most important monetary impact that automation can have on company delivery lifecycle.But one most important thing need to be remembered while focusing on automation is that manual testing is still gatekeeper of testing.Automation testing can be used for regression but we cannot guarantee a better automation suite without manual qa skimming through it.