Since my experience with Selenium is growing I become to understand it better every day. At first I was amazed about its possibilities. You can do a lot with Selenium WebDriver, but soon enough I came to realize it’s missing a few aspects. That’s how Bromine evolved from idea to project.
Filling in the Gaps
The Bromine project’s aim is to fill in the gaps in the default Selenium WebDriver Livery for Java. In stead of using Selenium, use Bromine that will on its turn use Selenium for you, while still leaving you enough means of customizing the WebDriver functionality.
Screenshots
A good example of a feature I was really missing in Selenium was a descent way of taking screenshots. The method getScreenshotAs(OutputType.FILE); just simply didn’t quit fulfill my needs (and those were from an automatic testing’s perspective). What I specifically wanted to be able to take a screenshot of the current browser instance any time I’d desire, but more importantly, every time a unit test fails.
In Bromine, a simple JUnit rule can take care of just that. Add it to your test class as follows:
@Rule
public ScreenShotOnFailure failure = new ScreenShotOnFailure("./screenshots/");
Statistics
When I use Selenium in a test framework, at some point, I might become interested in several statistics. Of course I do not intend to re-invent the wheel. I respect the current web analytics standard of today, Google Analytics, and I believe it to cover most needs one can have regarding statistics and analysis of a website.
What Google Analytics doesn’t provide you is statistics of events on your web page right in your test framework.
Why would that even be useful? Well, if you’re creating an automated test framework you are trying to ensure a qualitative final product for your users to interact with. Wouldn’t you want to know how many clicks one has to perform before reaching a particular page? Aren’t you interested in how many times form fields have to be filled in before a desired action occurs? Those are examples of what Bromine would like to cover.
As of version 0.2-alpha, a basic implementation of this is in place, ready for you to extend at will. I made sure I provided at least a very minimum, being tracking of left mouse button clicks, double clicks and the amount of times keys are entered.
Since I can image one might find the need to create their own tracking means, I ensured the system works with plugins (StatsPlugin) that can be registered and enabled any time.
Bringing SUT Structure
Selenium merely provides the ability to browse through websites, while what many might want to do would be structuring their System Under Test (SUT) inside their framework. It is a good practice to do so, since you might want to reuse pages and features that are used across the site multiple times.
Bromine provides a base to register pages (Page) and their respective sections (section) to a globally accessible collection (Pages). The easiest way to implement your application structure would be to assign a specific package in your project to contain classes extending the Page class. If you make use of the default no-parameter constructor, you won’t even have to create new instances of your pages. Just make sure to call registerAllPagesFromPackage(String pack) from the Pages class to register all your predefined pages to the collection.
Work in Progress
Bromine is currently in a very early stage. Additional extensions to Selenium are more than likely to appear, as well as probable breaking changes in the future. Needless to say that Bromine has to evolve as does Selenium.
Personally, I attempt to use the framework in multiple different projects. That way I can evaluate how useful it is and how well it works. Most useful features at the moment (for me personnally) are the screenshots and the structuring of pages from the SUT.
I’m happy to share the source on GitHub. I made it to be open source since I will always be open to feedback and improvement suggestions.
