Selenium

Installing ChromeDriver on Windows

Installing on Windows 7 & 10: The following are the best ways to install ChromeDriver on Windows so you can run Selenium: * The easiest way to install ChromeDriver is to use a package manager such as Chocolatey. You should really have a package manager if you don’t now: 1.

How To Run Your Selenium Tests with Headless Chrome

The Problem If you want to run your tests headlessly on a Continuous Integration (CI) server you’ll quickly realize that you can’t with an out-of-the-box setup since there is no display output for the browser to launch in. You could use a third party library like Xvfb (tip

How To Run Your Selenium Tests Headlessly in Docker

The Old Way It used to be that in order to get your Selenium tests running on a given machine you had to install each individual browser and then the browser drivers (for instance ChromeDriver for Chrome). Some of my most popular posts are about installing these drivers. However that’

8 Tools I use to Accelerate My Testing

Inspired by Justin Rorhman’s post of a similar name with a slight twist focusing on tools that generally help accelerate my testing. As a test and quality specialist embedded in an engineering team I have a lot of work to do on any given day. Our engineering team’s

Good and Bad UI Test Automation explained - Inspired by Richard Bradshaw's Tweets

Generally speaking there’s a scary trend with the influx of people interested in test automation where (seemingly) everyone wants to automate at the UI level. For example the phrase “Test automation” seems to be synonymous with UI automation which seems to mean using Selenium. To be fair there are

Practice using Selenium Now!

Have you ever wanted to learn a little bit about Selenium WebDriver but didn’t know where to start? Turns out there are some good tips / tutorials online for practicing writing Selenium in Ruby. One of those is a newsletter called Elemental Selenium that has something like 70 tips. You

Installing GeckoDriver on macOS

Overview of naming conventions * GeckoDriver is the library you need to download to be able to use Selenium WebDriver with Firefox. These are the Selenium Bindings. * Marionette is the protocol which Firefox uses to communicate with GeckoDriver. Installed by default with Firefox. * FirefoxDriver is the former name of GeckoDriver. Ways

Selenium-WebDriver 2.53.x not working with Firefox 47 and beyond

The problem I’m used to running selenium tests against Firefox locally (OS X Yosemite and now MacOS Sierra) both from the command line using RSpec and when using a REPL like IRB or Pry. I don’t use FF often so when I started having issues I couldn’t

Installing SafariDriver on macOS

Safari + WebDriver aka SafariDriver comes included in Safari 10 which means as long as you have Safari 10 and later versions you can point your tests at Safari and run them without installing anything else. Safari now provides native support for the WebDriver API. Starting with Safari 10 on OS

Debugging Selenium code with IRB

Occasionally something will change in our system under test that breaks a Selenium test (or two). Most of the time we can walk through the failure, make some tweaks and run it again – repeating the process until it passes. Depending on how long it’s been since we last worked

Review of The Selenium GuideBook: Ruby Edition

tl;dr If you’ve ever wanted to learn Selenium but didn’t know where to start, The Selenium GuideBook is the place (doesn’t matter which edition you use, it’ll be good). Page Contents * 1 Learning Selenium * 2 Book Options * 3 The Book * 4 Applying the Book and

The Promise and Failure of Record and Playback

I came across the below video of Bret Pettichord’s keynote presentation to the Selenium Conference in 2011 called “Science and Stories and Test Automation”. Much of the talk covers his experience with Test Automation, specifically the promise and failure of record and playback over the last 20 years (I

Running Rspec acceptance tests in TeamCity

At work we use TeamCity as our CI service to automate the build and deployment of our software to a number of pre-production environments for testing and evaluation. Since we’re already bottling up all the build and deployment steps for our software, I figured we could piggy back on

Catching up on a few Conferences

One of the great things about modern testing conferences is most either live stream or record their conference talks so the information can be disseminated to a wider audience. While you don’t get the interaction and conferring that an in-person visit would get you, it does make it easier

Screen resolution vs Resizing a window in Selenium

The main product I test was designed to follow a responsive web design layout so it could theoretically be used on anything from desktop computers to tablets and smartphones. Practically speaking this means different viewable window sizes (viewport sizes) will result in the browser placing elements of our application in

When to use a Gemfile

I’ve been building a GUI acceptance test automation suite locally in Ruby using the RSpec framework.  When it was time to get the tests running remotely on Sauce Labs, I ran into the following error: RSpec::Core::ExampleGroup::WrongScopeError: `example` is not available from within an example (e.g.

Installing ChromeDriver on macOS

The ChromeDriver getting started guide isn’t super helpful if you are unfamiliar with including the ChromeDriver location in your PATH environment variable. (The PATH variable helps Chrome find the downloaded ChromeDriver exe). Also it’s a lot of work for something so common. Never fear, here is a better

Including the ChromeDriver location in MacOS System PATH

The ChromeDriver getting started guide isn’t super helpful if you are unfamiliar with including the ChromeDriver location in your PATH environment variable. The PATH variable helps Chrome find the downloaded ChromeDriver exe. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve updated PATH variables on Windows for years but never on

Installing Ruby and Watir on Windows 7

I recently started playing around with Web Application Testing in Ruby or Watir for short. As is recommended, I downloaded the Homebrewer’s Guide to Watir by Zeljko Filipin and started trying to install the latest versions of the RubyInstaller for Windows (currently 2.0.0) when I ran into