There’s a saying we seem to band around the office (or zoom nowadays…) a lot, “you’ll look back at code you wrote 6 months ago and wonder what the hell you were doing… ”. To be honest I seem to do that with 1 week old code. We choose to take it as a sign of growth here, we’re happy that people continue to move forwards, and write cleaner, more maintainable and performant code, even if it means cringing slightly at previous pieces in the portfolio. Here’s 5 lessons learnt in the latest project we implemented, which happened to be a Java, Cucumber, Selenium UI test automation project.
Selecting an option from a dropdown by its html value, and not by visible text, is way more performant!
iFrames are fun to work with, especially multiple nested frames. To keep functions small we went for another layer of abstraction to handle navigating through the frames, locating the element, interacting with it then returning to the top level html document.
Cucumber is a powerful tool and can help make test automation more accessible, and for best results start by practicing Behaviour Driven Development as a team before implementing a test automation framework that relies on common Gherkin step definitions and the extra layer(s) of abstraction that need to be built into the framework.
Intellij is heavily customisable. One small customisation I will continue to use and now highly recommend is to highlight, bold and underscore typo’s
More often than not the answer to my challenge was in the building, all I needed to do was ask one of our awesome Testware engineers.
I’m sure there’s going to be tonnes more lessons learnt as we continue to deliver new solutions for our customers and solve new challenges. The hope is that there aren't too many of the same old mistakes!
Thanks for reading.
Linford