The Java Selenium Guidebook

One of the biggest problems with learning Selenium is all the various information you need to piece together in order to get started. It’s easy to get frustrated and filled up information overload and end up not making any progress with learning Selenium.Have you ever wished there was a quick jump-start guide that could get you started with test automation without all the bells in whistles, but a concise good practices approach to learning Selenium? Well this episode is for you as we speak with Dave Heaufffner about his new book The Selenium Guidebook – Java edition.

About Dave

Dave is the writer of Elemental Selenium — a free, once weekly Selenium tip newsletter that is read by hundreds of testing professionals. He is also the creator and maintainer of ChemistryKit(an open-source Selenium framework). He has helped numerous companies successfully implement automated acceptance testing; including The Motley Fool, ManTech International, Sittercity, and Animoto. He is a founder and co-organizer of the Selenium Hangout and has spoken at numerous conferences and meetups about acceptance testing..

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• I’ve also seen an explosive growth in JavaScript usage. Companies with mature implemented Java frameworks, leaning into the thought of re-writing things into JavaScript.
• I’ve released a second edition of my book. I branched out from Ruby into Java. That was something I started before I started traveling oversees for Selenium stuff. It really confirmed and driven home how widespread Java is with regards to Selenium. Every company, with one exception, used Java for Selenium. Since then I’ve looked up all the download numbers for Selenium across all the programming languages and Java owns, this year, something like 65% of the downloads for Selenium.
• The thing I would say is that it was actually a nice break from spending so much time in a dynamically typed scripting language where everything is an object. To a very explicit, strongly typed language that’s compiled what it’s doing. Where as in Ruby, if inadvertently the type of an object gets changed, that object becomes that new type but there is no way to really know. So you could have a really pernicious bug in your test code and not realize it and finding it can be hard. In Java, it’s like “Well, it just won’t run.” It will tell you where it’s broken and it’ll probably tell you where it’s broken as you type. I really appreciated that. I think it made things a fair bit easier in that you can work past the verbosity of things pretty quickly. Because you end up gaining a lot on insight into exactly what a test is supposed to be doing.
• Yandex released, what’s called the Allure framework, which for those of you that don’t know, it’s basically a really awesome HTML report generator for Selenium tests. It is platform agnostic and there are bindings for almost all, if not all by now, of the prominent testing frameworks for all prominent programming languages that are out there.
• The goal of the Selenium Guide book is really, and also for my tip newsletter, Elemental Selenium, is to offer all of this content in every supported programming language for Selenium. That’s an exclusive for TestTalk, not listeners. 
• As far as my book goes, there’s a free sample available and you can find out all you want to know by going to seleniumguidebook.com, about halfway down on the page is the free sample. If you sign up for any of those things you ultimately end up getting the weekly tip emails from me. 

Resources

• Get the Selenium Guidebook Now!
• Applitools – Visual Validation automation awesomeness
• Yandex QA tools

Connect with Dave

• Twitter:@TourDeDave
• Blog: ElementalSelenium

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