Case Study: Extract All Substack Article Titles and Links. Part E: Annotations by Zhimin *

Helpful Tips to Mid-Level Test Automation Engineers. (This is a Substack Exclusive Article)

This article series:

• Part A: Extract Individual Article Data

• Part B: Extract 25 articles on one page

• Part C: Extract All

• Part D: Generate HTML and Publish

• Part E: Annotations by Zhimin

This is an excellent web test automation exercise with various test automation design techniques, best practices, and some difficulty. I recommend senior and principal test engineers give it a try.

This article explains some of the techniques and design principles that Courtney used (which I taught her, as well as other mentees). I believe the content will be highly beneficial to mid-level test automation engineers looking to level up, especially for readers who have actually tried the exercises.

Table of Contents:
* This is an Automation Script, NOT an Automated Test Script
* TestWise Debugging Mode
* Good Automation Framework: Selenium WebDriver
* Some Selenium Techniques Courtney Used:
* Good Scripting Language: Ruby
* Script Design Approach: Small Steps
* Script Design Approach: Create Intermediate Artifacts
* Use the best tool for the job

This is an Automation Script, NOT an Automated Test Script

Many junior automation testers are unaware of the differences between an automation script and an automated test script.

Simply put, an automation script is task-oriented; its primary goal is to get the job done, and execution reliability isn't a critical concern.

For example, in this case study, the script in Part C failed to extract pages 9 and 11, but a subsequent patch script resolved the issue. This is acceptable for an automation script. However, such behaviour would be completely unacceptable for an end-to-end (E2E) automated test script, which is designed to run frequently and requires high reliability.

“Once you truly master E2E test automation, you'll realize there’s so much it can do to improve both your daily work and personal tasks.” - Zhimin Zhan

TestWise Debugging Mode

Without TestWise, the process can be much more difficult, resulting in increased time and frustration. TestWise's Debugging Mode enables you to easily experiment with test steps directly (and quickly) in the browser. This allows you to manually interact with the web page when necessary, such as bypassing two-factor authentication, as shown in this example.

You may have read the story about how my daughter excelled as a 'Senior Test Automation Engineer' during her internship. The ‘secret’ (but publicly available, also in a free form) weapon: TestWise, the Next-Gen Functional Testing IDE.

Courtney also applied the "Extract to Method" refactoring in TestWise to clean up the script and make it more organized.

Good Automation Framework: Selenium WebDriver