Pankaj Nakhat's Blog about Testing, Automation and Agile Testing

Web apps are getting complex with browsers getting rich in behavior at the same time diverse from diff browsers. Technologies like Ajax and J-query has given a new dimensions to web apps. But at the same time automation testing getting difficult with rich javascript pages . 

How do one cope up with this. Multiple browser, different behaviors and rich client specific technologies to write and maintain tests.

Web automation needs to be maintainable and scalable, but how does one keep these factors in mind coping up with browser's incompatibility.

1) Select a tool which behaves with different browsers naively.

2) Write scripts driven by user behavior.

3) Avoid using browser specific object identification. (e.g> X- Path)

4) Keep scripts modular and small, so that its easy to write and maintain.

5) Don't hack the stuff to make something work (E.g> using javascript to do stuff - like cookie editing), I would rather avoid doing that, as brittle scripts may lead to serious disaster, especially in agile environment.

This an awesome driver to test application for various reasons. This is also a better alternative for selenium. Webdriver works on the Principal of talking to browser naively, unlike selenium which works through proxy using javascript. 

One thing is obvious immediately is 'speed', webdriver tests run much faster then selenium, reason explained above.

Webdriver is going to become Selenium 2.0 eventually. I personally think, webdriver is next big thing in web functional testing after selenium.

Thanks to Simon Stewart for this awesome tool.