I’ve been doing some work lately creating automated functional test suites using Selenium RC to simulate user interaction with a web GUI. I discovered quickly that the tests you record directly from selenium are rather brittle, and hard to read. In order to make the tests more robust and readable, I have been extracting reusable chunks of script that make sense from the user perspective, into separate methods. For example when testing a page for registering a new provider, you might have a ProviderPage domain class, with method “createNewProvider”. This method encapsulates all the selenium calls that interact with the page, and lets your test be written in terms of the domain.
I just saw this article from Patrick Wilson Welsh basically saying the same thing, only his DSL has three layers of indirection instead of just two. As well as encapsulating page operations in a Page class, he encapsulates operations on widgets within a page. I hadn’t thought of doing that. It makes the code in the Page class more readable. I might try that, and see if it improves my code.
