White Paper: Getting Started with Test Automation

We’ve just posted up a white paper I wrote on getting started with UI test automation. The whitepaper has nothing to do with Test Studio (examples are even in WebDriver via C# !). Instead it focuses on the fundamental things you’ll need to work on in order to have a successful future with UI automation.

In the paper I cover a broad range of topics including:

• UI Automation is a difficult domain. Seems obvious, but you have to acknowledge it up front!
• Locators, locators, locators. Learn how they work, then learn how the work in your environment.
• Working with dynamic content. Regardless of whether it’s because of AJAX, JQuery, or Silverlight/WPF service calls, you’ll need to grok how to handle situations where asynchronous operations update your page/view on the fly.
• UI automation is a software engineering effort. UI automation has to be treated with the same discipline we approach the systems we’re building, regardless of whether you’re using something slick like Test Studio, creating page objects via Jeff Morgan’s page object gem, or writing WebDriver code.

There are a number of other topics as well. I try to lay everything out in a problem/solution context.

Grab the paper from our download page, have a look through, and see what you think.

Do you have anything you’d like to see in future versions?