automation

fijiaaron

How long does it take to learn Selenium and Python

This is another post that grew out of a question asked by someone else online.

Here is the original question (and my answer) on Quora:

https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-to-learn-selenium-Webdriver-with-Python

There are several different things here, and they affect how long it will take you to learn Selenium with Python.

Let’s break it down:

  1. Learning Selenium
  2. Learning Python
  3. Learning programming
  4. Learning test automation

Your existing knowledge in each of these topics will affect how easy it is.

For example, if you’ve already used Selenium with another programming language, that means that (to some degree) you also know programming and test automation principles. So all you need to learn is Python.

But if you have some programming experience in JavaScript but have never done test automation (with or without Selenium) or used Python, you come with general programming knowledge (but using a different paradigm) there are more obstacles.

Alternately, you may have experience with test automation so you understand the goals, but have used a commercial low-code record and playback automation tool. This may actually be harder than starting from a programming background because it requires a paradigm shift in your strategy to test automation.

However, probably most people asking this question have some experience manually testing software, a basic knowledge of programming (either in Python, or some other language — but would not consider themselves expert), and want to know how long it would take them to become competent enough with Selenium and Python to either:

A. Get a job doing test automation with Selenium and Python or
B. Apply test automation with Selenium and Python in their current job
(which may be manual testing, or some other role).

So, I’ll try to answer this question.

Give yourself a few weeks to learn the basics of Python, general programming principles, and the “Pythonic” idioms. A good course on Udemy or book about Python is about what you need. Subtract if you already understand some of this, if you’re a fast learner, or have guidance (such as a mentor.)

But it’s not really about how quickly you can absorb knowledge, it’s practice to retain it, and having the time to make mistakes and experiment.

And then it will only take a week or two to pick up Selenium. It has a fairly straightforward API, and the concepts of automating finding buttons and clicking on them is fairly simple to understand. There are some obstacles that can trip you up though — things like provisioning and configuring a WebDriver, managing sessions, “getting” locators like XPath and CSS, data driven, using Pytest and fixtures, etc can trip you up and lead to hours (or days) of frustration — or you can establish bad habits that will bite you in the future.

But applying Selenium in a meaningful way to write useful test automation may take additional weeks, or months (or years) of practice. Again, this depends on your personal curiosity, cleverness, mentoring opportunities, and above all, practice and ability to apply it in the real world.

These challenges fall under writing good maintainable test automation, knowing what to test and how to approach it, and even little things like picking good locators, or naming functions and variables well.

If you were smart, and scrolled to the bottom, short answer is:

It should only take you a few weeks to pick up Python and Selenium, depending on where you are coming from experience-wise and how fast you learn. Having mentors and or guided learning can help you focus on what’s important and get past silly obstacles. But like anything, it will take a much longer time to master, and depend on real world experience applying the principles, making mistakes, and learning from them.

A reasonable time to go from basic programming knowledge and no test automation experience to competent enough to make an impact at a job (e.g. get hired as a junior test automation engineer) is a few months of steady learning and practice.

fijiaaron

Install MacOS updates remotely via Command Line over SSH

Automating OS updates can be an important part of OpSec. Here’s a quick script to enable automatic OS updates on MacOS:

See if Mac OS updates are installed by going to System Preferences > Software Updates > Advanced.

You want “Install MacOS updates” to be checked.

But you can also check this via the Command Line (when accessing remote devices via SSH, for example).

% sudo defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate

You should see a plist that includes:

AutomaticallyInstallMacOSUpdates = 0;

To enable “Install MacOS updates”

% sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate AutomaticallyInstallMacOSUpdates -boolean TRUE

And it should now be enabled, indicated by

AutomaticallyInstallMacOSUpdates = 1;

{
    AutomaticCheckEnabled = 1;
    AutomaticDownload = 1;
    AutomaticallyInstallMacOSUpdates = 1;
    LastAttemptBuildVersion = "12.1 (21C52)";
    LastAttemptSystemVersion = "12.1 (21C52)";
    LastBackgroundSuccessfulDate = "2022-01-25 15:33:22 +0000";
    LastFullSuccessfulDate = "2022-01-25 20:41:17 +0000";
    LastRecommendedMajorOSBundleIdentifier = "";
    LastRecommendedUpdatesAvailable = 0;
    LastResultCode = 2;
    LastSessionSuccessful = 1;
    LastSuccessfulDate = "2022-01-25 20:41:21 +0000";
    LastUpdatesAvailable = 0;
    PrimaryLanguages =     (
        "en-US",
        en
    );
    RecommendedUpdates =     (
    );
}

And also represented with a checkbox in the SoftwareUpdate GUI.

You can now run “softwareupdate” from the command line to update MacOS:

% sudo softwareupdate --install --os-only --restart

Now you can automate your script to remotely check (and enable) automatic software updates on MacOS.

fijiaaron

How to get cryptocurrency prices using Python (and various tools)

Here’s another post based on a question from Quora:

Can I export the contents of an HTML table to Excel or MySQL via Selenium/Python?

No, you can’t export a table from HTML to Excel or MySQL using Selenium with Python.

But you’re in luck! You just asked the wrong question.

It’s like if you had asked: “Can I build a bookshelf using my DeWalt Table Saw?”

The answer is, of course, still no, but a reasonable person would say that your table saw is one of the tools you could use, but you’re also going to need a hammer, and some nails — or a screwdriver and screws — and maybe some paint or varnish. And a couple clamps to hold it all to together while you’re building it.

Unfortunately, I am not a reasonable person. But I’ll show you how to do it anyway.

You can use Selenium with Python to extract content from an HTML table. You can then use other tools (with Python) to import that content into an Excel spreadsheet or MySQL database.

For example, I’ll fetch cryptocurrency prices from CoinMarketCap using Selenium:

# get the HTML table data using Selenium
from selenium import webdriver

url = "https://coinmarketcap.com/"
table_locator = "xpath", "//table"

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get(url)

table_webelement = driver.find_element(*table_locator)
table_html = table_webelement.get_attribute("outerHTML")

In addition to Selenium, I’d recommend using Pandas DataFrames to export to Excel — both because it’s easier than working with openpyxl directory (or xlwt, or xlsxwriter, or one of several other lower level libraries) and because pandas has all sorts of other great data manipulation features that might come in handy. (And it looks great on a resume!)

Here’s how you can use Python to read an HTML table directly into a Pandas Dataframe and then export it to a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet using DataFrame.to_excel()

# load the HTML table to Pandas DataFrame
import pandas

dataframes = pandas.read_html(table_html)

# get the first and only table on the page
table_dataframe = dataframes[0] 

# export data to Excel
table_dataframe.to_excel("data.xlsx")

Here is the resulting spreadsheet:

Excel Spreadsheet with Most Recent Cryptocurrency Pricing

Or you can export the Dataframe to a database.

Here, we use MySQL Connector with SQL Alchemy to append our results from the HTML table to a table named “prices” into the MariaDB “test” database. If the table does not exist, it creates it.

Using Pandas Datataframe.to_sql()

# export data to MySQL (or MariaDB)
import sqlalchemy
from mysql import connector

conn = sqlalchemy.create_engine("mysql+mysqlconnector://username:password@localhost/test")

table_dataframe.to_sql(con=conn, name="prices", if_exists='append', index=False)

And our resulting table will look like this:

MYSQL Table with Most Recent Cryptocurrency Pricing

There are also other tools you may be able to use:

requests HTTP library instead of Selenium if you don’t need to manipulate the browser to fetch data

# get prices using requests
import requests

response = requests.get("https://coinmarketcap.com/")

BeautifulSoup4 to parse the HTML into a List of Lists

# parse data using Beauitful Soup
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser")
table_soup = soup.find("table")

headings = [th.text.strip() for th in table_soup.find_all("th")]

rows = []
for tr in table_soup.find_all('tr', limit=11):
    row = []
    for td in tr.find_all('td'):
        row.append(td.text.strip())
    rows.append(row)

csv to parse into a CSV instead of Excel format (a CSV file can also be loaded directly into MySQL without Pandas).

#export data to csv file
import csv 
 
with open("data.csv", mode="w") as csvfile: 
    writer = csv.writer(csvfile) 
    writer.writerow(headings) 
    writer.writerows(rows)

Of course , you can also load your data List into pandas as well:

table_dataframe = pandas.DataFrame(rows)

Here is a gist showing all the code together:

pip install selenium
pip install pandas
pip install openpyxl
pip install sqlalchemy
pip install mysql-connector-python
pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install requests
view raw dependencies hosted with ❤ by GitHub
# get prices using requests
import requests
response = requests.get("https://coinmarketcap.com/")
# parse data using Beauitful Soup
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser")
table_soup = soup.find("table")
headings = [th.text.strip() for th in table_soup.find_all("th")]
rows = []
for tr in table_soup.find_all('tr', limit=11):
row = []
for td in tr.find_all('td'):
row.append(td.text.strip())
rows.append(row)
# save data using CSV
import csv
with open("data.csv", mode="w") as csvfile:
writer = csv.writer(csvfile)
writer.writerow(headings)
writer.writerows(rows)
view raw get_prices_using_requests_beautiful_soup_and_csv.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub
from selenium import webdriver
url = "https://coinmarketcap.com/"
table_locator = "xpath", "//table"
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get(url)
table_webelement = driver.find_element(*table_locator)
table_html = table_webelement.get_attribute("outerHTML")
# load the HTML table to Pandas DataFrame
import pandas
dataframes = pandas.read_html(table_html)
table_dataframe = dataframes[0] # get the first and only table on the page
# export data to Excel
table_dataframe.to_excel("data.xlsx")
# export data to MySQL (or MariaDB)
import sqlalchemy
from mysql import connector
conn = sqlalchemy.create_engine("mysql+mysqlconnector://username:password@localhost/test")
table_dataframe.to_sql(con=conn, name="prices", if_exists='append', index=False)
view raw get_prices_using_selenium_and_pandas.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub
fijiaaron

When should you use JavaScriptExecutor in Selenium?

When you want to execute JavaScript on the browser :)

This was my answer to a question on Quora

https://www.quora.com/When-should-I-use-JavaScriptExecutor-in-Selenium-WebDriver/answer/Aaron-Evans

JavaScriptExecutor is an interface that defines 2 methods:

in Java (and similarly in C#):

Object executeScript(String script, Object... args)

and

Object executeAsyncScript(String script, Object... args)

which take as an argument a string representing the JavaScript code you want to execute on the browser and (optionally) one or more arguments. If the second argument is a WebElement it will apply the script to the corresponding HTML element. Arguments are added to the JS magic arguments variable which represents the values passed to a function. If the code executed returns a value, that is returned to your Selenium code

Each driver is responsible for implementing it for the browser.

RemoteWebDriver implements it as well.

But when *you* as a Selenium user want to use JavaScriptExecutor is when you assign a driver to the base type WebDriver, which does not implement it.

in this case, you cast your driver instance (which really does implement executeScript() and executeScriptAsync().

For example

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();  

// base type ‘WebDriver’ does not define executeScript()  although our instance that extends RemoteWebDriver actually does implement it.  

// So we need to cast it to ‘JavaScriptExecutor’ to let the Java compiler know.  

JavaScriptExecutor js = (JavaScriptExecutor) driver;  

js.executeScript(“alert(‘hi from Selenium’);”

if you keep your instance typing, you do not need to cast to JavaScriptExecutor.

RemoteWebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(url, capabilities);  

// information about our type is not lost so the Java compiler knows our object implements executeScript()  

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id(“mybutton”));  

driver.executeScript(“arguments[0].click();", element);  

// in the above case it adds the element to arguments and performs a click() event (in JavaScript in the browser) on our element

String htmlsnippet = driver.executeScript(“return document.querySelector(‘#myid’).outerHTML” , element);  

// this time we use native JavaScript on the browser to find an element and return its HTML, bypassing Selenium’s ability to do so.

The above two examples illustrate ways you can accomplish in JavaScript what you would normally use Selenium for.

Why would you do this?

Well, sometimes the driver has a bug, or it can be more efficient (or reliable) to do in JavaScript, or you might want to combine multiple actions in 1 WebDriver call.

fijiaaron

Weekly Wednesday Webinar on Selenium & Sauce Labs

I’ve been working at Sauce Labs for a while now, helping enterprise users build test automation frameworks and implement continuous integration using Selenium & Sauce Labs.

In order to reach a larger audience — and to learn more about people’s challenges developing test automation — I’m going to be hosting a weekly webinar on using Selenium with Sauce Labs for test automation.

So, starting this week, each Wednesday during lunch (12:30pm Mountain Time) I’ll host a webinar / office hours.  I’ll begin with a brief presentation introducing the topic, followed by a demo (live coding — what could go wrong?), and then open it up for questions & comments.

The first webinar will be tomorrow at 12:30pm MST.  The topic is DesiredCapabilities.

I’ll talk about what desired capabilities are, how to use desired capabilities with Sauce Labs, and show how you can use the  Sauce Labs platform configurator to generate desired capabilities.  I’ll also talk about Sauce Labs specific capabilities used to report on tests and builds.

Register on EventBrite here: Selenium & Sauce Labs Webinar: Desired Capabilities

Join the WebEx directly: Selenium & Sauce Labs Webinar: Desired Capabilities

Contact me if you’d like a calendar invite or more info.

fijiaaron

Acceptance Criteria Presentation

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation about acceptance criteria and agile testing to a team of developers I’m working with.

Some of the developers were familiar with agile processes & test driven development, but some were not. I introduced the idea of behavior driven development, with both rspec “it should” and gherkin “given/when/then” style syntax. I stressed that the exact syntax is not important, but consistency helps with understanding and can also help avoid “testers block”.

It’s a Java shop, but I didn’t get into the details of JBehave, Cucumber or any other frameworks.  I pointed out that you can write tests this way without implementing the automation steps and still get value — with the option of completing the automation later.  This is particularly valuable in a system that is difficult to test, or has external dependencies that aren’t easily mocked.

Here are the slides:

Acceptance Criteria Presentation [PDF] or [PPTX]

And a rough approximation below:

Acceptance Criteria

 

how to make it easier to know if what you’re doing is what they want you to do

What are Acceptance Criteria?

Image

By any other name…

● Requirements
● Use Cases
● Features
● Specifications
● User Stories
● Acceptance Tests
● Expected Results
● Tasks, Issues, Bugs, Defects,Tickets…

What are Acceptance Criteria?

Image

…would smell as sweet

 ● A way for business to say what they want
● A way for customers to describe what they need
● A way for developers to know when a feature is done
● A way for testers to know if something is working right

The “Agile” definition

User Stories

As a … [who]
I want to … [action]
So that I can … [result]

Acceptance Criteria

Given … [some precondition]
When … [action is performed]
Then … [expected outcome]

(Gherkin style)

Acceptance Criteria

Describe [the system] … [some context]

It (the system) should … [expected result]

(“should” syntax)

Shh…don’t tell the business guys

it’s programming

Image

but can be compiled by humans…and computers!

Inputs and Outputs

if I enter X + Y
then the result should be Z

f(x,y) = z

 

 Not a proof

or a function
or a test
or a requirement
or …

It’s just a way to help everyone understand

It should

  1. Describe “it”
    (feature/story/task/requirement/issue/defect/whatever)
  2. Give steps to perform
  3. List expected results

Show your work

Image

● Provide examples
● List preconditions
● Specify exceptions

A conversation not a specification

Do…

● use plain English
● be precise
● be specific

Don’t…

● worry about covering everything
● include implementation details
● use jargon
● assume system knowledge

Thanks!

If you’re interested in learning how to turn your manual testing process into an agile automated test suite,  I can help.

contact me

Aaron Evans
aarone@one-shore.com

425-242-4304

 

 

fijiaaron

Thoughts on NUnit and MSTest

I recently had a discussion with some other developers about NUnit and MSTest. My personal preference is based on familiarity — originally from JUnit and TestNG, but also with NUnit. NUnit was around long before MSTest, and MSTest was not available with Visual Studio Express. I personally, haven’t used MSTest so I scoured the internet and picked some colleagues brains to come up with this post.

Here was my original question:

Thoughts on NUnit vs MSTest? I like NUnit because it’s more familiar coming from JUnit/TestNG and doesn’t depend on Visual Studio runtime, but it has it’s drawbacks. Any other opinions?

Here’s one exchange:

I like NUnit also even though my experience is with MSTest… VS2012 now supports Nunit also! We support both in the CD infrastructure. Most anything you can do in MSTest can be done with Nunit with a little understanding.

What is it about NUnit that you like even though you’re experienced with MSTest?

I have found NUnit to be supported and maintained as a first class solution for testing across most tools/test runners. Sonar and Go support NUnit natively. MSTest results are still not supported in Go and in Sonar it’s an add-on plugin.

MSTest is only good if you are 100% in MS technologies for build and deployment using TFS build agents. In our mixed technology environment NUnit bridges them all smoother than MSTest.

And another:

While we support both in GO, MStest requires Visual Studio to be installed on the agent (ridiculous, imo).

NUnit usually runs faster (due to reduced I/O, since it doesn’t produce a separate folder for each test run with shadow-copied assemblies).

The testing community in general prefers NUnit, so it’s easier to find help/examples.

I could go on, but here’s a couple of great articles:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2367734/nunit-vs-visual-studio-2010s-mstest

http://nexussharp.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/showdown-mstest-vs-nunit/

Here are additional comments based on internet comments:

I agree that it’s ridiculous to require Visual Studio for test execution but I understand you can get around it with just  the Windows SDK and some environment tweaks.

I wasn’t aware before of all the file pollution MSTest does, both with the references and VSMDI files and all the temp files it generates.  With the Go agents we have set up neither of those are too big of issues anymore.

The syntax was my main preference, but I found you can use NUnit Assertions with MSTest — including Assert.That() and Assert.Throws() by doing this:

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting; 
using Assert = NUnit.Framework.Assert;

But you can also use the independent Fluent Assertions which I think is even nicer.  I still prefer the NUnit attribute names though.

Here is a somewhat dated comparison of the NUnit, MSTest attribute syntax

XUnit / Gallio has some nice data driven features (http://blog.benhall.me.uk/2008/01/introduction-to-xunitnet-extensions.html) but some weird syntax such as [Fact] instead of [Test] (http://xunit.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Comparisons) and I think data providers should be a separate implementation than tests – like NUnit’s [TestCase TestCaseSource(methodName) http://nunit.org/index.php?p=testCaseSource&r=2.5

One last thing I like about NUnit is that it’s standalone.  You could choose to include a specific version of the NUnit libraries with each project – and even fork if you want to add features because it’s open source, though that’s not really practical.  But the open source nature – and that it’s older – means that you can find lots of information on the intertubes.

I wasn’t too impressed with a the Native NUnit runner inside Visual Studio 2012, but Resharper makes it nice.  Some people on my team have complained about the extra weight Resharper adds, though I haven’t seen a problem (with 8GB RAM.) One complaint I can understand is the shortcut collisions R# introduces especially if your fingers were trained on Visual Studio, but for someone like me coming from Java IDEs the Resharper shortcuts are wonderful.

R# is a beautiful, beautiful thing – the extra weight is well worth it, what more could you ask for than IntelliJ in VS?

I can’t say I have much of a syntactical preference either way, but I would just say ‘Amen’ to earlier thoughts.

 

fijiaaron

Running NUnit tests programmatically

I’m working on a test framework that needs to be run by less-technical testers. The tests are data driven from a spreadsheet (google docs spreadsheet API + gdata.)

Tests will be run locally (for now at least) since there isn’t a test lab available for remote execution, and no CI. I didn’t want to have to require users to install NUnit to execute tests.

At first I started by writing a main() class and rolling my own assertions. But I decided that the parameterized test features of NUnit were worth the effort of a little research. NUnit can, in fact, be run programmatically, though the execution appears less flexible than with other frameworks.

I created a TestRunner class with main function:


using System;
using NUnit.Core;
using NUnit.Framework.Constraints;
using NLog;

namespace oneshore.qa.testrunner
{
    class TestRunner
    {
        Logger log = NLog.LogManager.GetCurrentClassLogger();

        public static void Main(String[] args)
        {
            //get from command line args
            String pathToTestLibrary = "C:\\dev\\oneshore.Tests.DLL"; 

            DateTime startTime = System.DateTime.Now;
            log.Info("starting test execution...");

            TestRunner runner = new TestRunner();
            runner.run(pathToTestLibrary);

            log.Info("...test execution finished");
            DateTime finishTime = System.DateTime.Now;
            TimeSpan elapsedTime = finishTime.Subtract(startTime);
            log.Info("total elapsed time: " + elapsedTime);
        }

        public void run(String pathToTestLibrary)
        {
            CoreExtensions.Host.InitializeService();
            TestPackage testPackage = new TestPackage(@pathToTestLibrary);
            testPackage.BasePath = Path.GetDirectoryName(pathToTestLibrary);
            TestSuiteBuilder builder = new TestSuiteBuilder();
            TestSuite suite = builder.Build(testPackage);
            TestResult result = suite.Run(new NullListener(), TestFilter.Empty);

            log.Debug("has results? " + result.HasResults);
            log.Debug("results count: " + result.Results.Count);
            log.Debug("success? " + result.IsSuccess);
        }
    }
}

Link to gist of this code.

The advantage to running tests this way is that NUnit does not need to be installed (though DLLs for NUnit — nunit.core.dll & nunit.core.interfaces.dll — and any other dependencies like NLog need to be packaged with the TestRunner.) You can still write and execute your tests from NUnit while under development.

One disadvantage is that you don’t have the full test results by using the TestSuiteBuilder to bundle every test it finds into one suite. I’d like to find a way to improve that. You also can’t run more than one test assembly at the same time — you can create a nunit project xml for that — and at that point you might as well bundle the nunit test framework.

For now, my base test class (that each of my Nunit tests inherit from) reports via catching and counting assertion failures and writing to a log file. It can then use the Quality Center integration tool I described in an earlier post, though I’m planning on wiring it all together eventually, so anyone can run tests automatically by clicking on an icon, using a File Picker dialog to select the test library (see upcoming post) and have test results entered in QC.

This will allow distributed parameterized testing that can be done by anyone. I may try to set up a web UI like fitnesse for data driven tests as well.