Best Practices for UI Test Automation with selenium and Java

Our company is trying to adopt UI test automation. They showed me their previous attempt on Test Automation which was basically what you can expect from over worked QA engineers who are asked to create a test automation project alongside their other duties in short frame of time. From what i saw it had many flaws and wasn't successful. I am beginner in this field and i would like to find out about,

1. Any detailed guide of best practices in UI Test Automation
2. Any github repo for test automation project done by some
   respectable company in software development showcasing best practices.

The reason i am posting here is that most of the guides i found online was basic or lacking details. Also it's impossible to find test automation project done by some software company. If any of you guys work in a company which has public repo kindly share it here that would be mighty helpful.

You probably aren't finding stuff online because typically those framework materials represent time and investment. They're either sell-able material (e.g. consultancies that have generic frameworks) or bespoke for a client (which e.g. expose internal system workings).

An automation framework starts with some requirements gathering. Loads of things to consider - Some sample thoughts:

• Do you know what you want to test?
• Is it purely web? Is it thick client? does it involve mobile? a mix and match?
• Are you involved with the dev team? do you know what's been tested at the different levels before you get to the UI?
• Do you have the right skills to follow this through?

If you google "automation framework requirements" you'll get a lot of ideas.

This article [disclaimer! - i wrote it] talks about automation problems you encounter from the top level without into the code. I'd consider most of those pretty good practice and there are parts of it you can plan for early on.

Taking a bit from the article:

> Automation needs to test the right things
>
> Automation needs to just run
>
> Automation needs to run well

It uses examples from my career of things I've seen done wrong and how to correct them.

Beyond that....

Modern automation typically steers you towards the test automation pyramid (not my article this time).

When you get to the lower level, general programming rules are important. I can't give you a direct steer on a framework you've not designed but simple rules help:

• DRY
• YAGNI
• SOLID (as much as you can)

Final thought here is you don't have to build a framework.There are generic open source frameworks out there which can get you started.

1. Make sure that application is in Regression stage
2. Automating and stabilizing tests take a lot of time
3. Don't try to automate everything in the beginning. Automate the most important tests. Flows which are followed by most of the people on the Website.
4. Decide the framework - data-driven or hybrid or POM
5. The decision of which framework to use saves a lot of time in the future. Data-driven is most simple and easy to change as well. POM and hybrid are complex but can be more reusable.
6. Look and understand some existing automation frameworks before you choose a new one.
7. Decide on the type of reporting you to need

Using Selenium for automated testing is a learning curve. It’s not as simple as copying from a working example. This is an article on Selenium automation testing to help you get started with learning the best practices. When beginning your journey with Selenium, identify a small UI feature to automate so you can familiarise yourself with the setup of required components, and how to run and manage the test. Try start with testing something like a login process, after which you can create more tests that incorporate more UI functionality once you fully understand the whole Selenium/Java environment.