Test Practices

A note on “Best Practices”: We’ve intentionally avoided the phrase “Best Practices” in this documentation. No one approach works for all situations. We prefer the idea of “Guidelines and Recommendations.” We encourage you to read through these and thoughtfully decide what approaches will work for you in your particular environment.

Functional testing is challenging to get right for many reasons. As if application state, complexity, and dependencies do not make testing difficult enough, dealing with browsers (especially with cross-browser incompatibilities) makes writing good tests a challenge.

Selenium provides tools to make functional user interaction easier, but does not help you write well-architected test suites. In this chapter, we offer advice, guidelines, and recommendations on how to approach functional web page automation.

This chapter records software design patterns popular amongst many of the users of Selenium that have proven successful over the years.