Sitegeist

Proof of concept for a configuration based Selenium Web testing system.

Trying out a way to do behavioral testing of websites with Selenium. In the past I've used this excellent toolkit for code driven testing. Writing these tests could be a bit labor intensive.

There are several Chrome plugins for "recording" workflows - these helped to identify the IDs, Names and XPaths to the elements, but still needed to write code to perform the tests.

Sitegeist is a proof of concept of having a configuration approach to executing the tests, and verifying things go as expected. These are the core concepts of this project:

Importers

Many of the Chrome recording plugins are able to export out the "scripts" in various formats - json, xml, even code files. An importer in Sitegeist will read in those exports and create Sitegeist Script files. Using the IImporter interface, additional importers can be created

Script Files

These are the configuration of the actions and expectations. These contain:

• Steps: A set of actions, expectations and getters groupped together
• Actions: Actions to take on a page or against a specific element - clicking a button, entering text, logging information to the logs, etc. (IScriptActionConfig / IScriptActionRuntime interface for creating new actions)
• Expectations: Verfication that an expected behavior occured - an element is visible, the current page's url, text in an element, etc. (IScriptExpectConfig / IScriptExpectRuntime interfaces for creating new expectations)
• Getter: Extract information from the page into a variable - text in an element

Variables

Sometimes there are variations of the same tests, but with different values entered in a field. Other actions/expectations need values from a previous step. Sitegeist allows for placeholders in strings to be replaced with values captured elsewhere ont the page or variables defined in the script itself.

Variable Injection

A Getter can extract a value from an element and save to a variable, ex: labelText. Then an action later on can use that value in textbox, using the format "{labelText}".

There are several system formats as well, specifically for Datetime variations

Input/Ouput

• Logging: Sitegeist can write logging information to different places: File, Console, etc. The ILogger interface allows for extensibility, so that you can write to an on-prem database or one in the cloud
• LogMessageAction: This Action will write Variable values to the configured logger for later evaluation
• Scripts/Results: These can be stored on local disk, or using the appropriate interfaces, can be persisted to a database or elsewhere

Snapshot

• ElementSnapshotAction: Take screenshot of the page and crop to the element for visual review later on
• Step: Take a snapshot before and/or afterward a step is completed to see the changes on the pages
• Diff: Diffs can be taken of a step before/after or from previous executions to see what has changed

Extensibility

All user facing functionality is based on interfaces, so that different Actions, Expects, Getters, Loggers, Script/Result stores can easily be added to the system.

Future to dos:

• User interface
  • make a web interface for to view/create/edit scripts
  • view/compare results
  • set baseline snapshots for steps