Using Firebug 2.0 to craft XPaths

Firebug has been my favorite Firefox add-on for a long time now. In the time before every browser had decent developer tools, Firebug was a revolutionary add-on that allowed many testers, like myself, tools to interact, learn and explore what web applications were doing. I recently upgraded my Firebug to version 2.0. I was pleasantly surprised to find a cool […]

The art of writing xpaths

Problem: Writing XPaths is hard and confusing when there are no unique identifiers XPath (XML Path Language) is a query language for selecting nodes from Document Object Models (DOM) like XML, HTML, etc. XPaths are frequently used with Selenium scripts to uniquely identify elements in page. This post is a descriptive tutorial on how to think about xpaths and write […]

Cross browser testing tools

Problem: Maintaining testing infrastructure for testing across different combinations of browser, browser version and platform is difficult and time consuming. Of late, there are many tools that help testers quickly spin up any combination of browser, browser version and platform. Below, we give a brief outline of some tools that we use at Qxf2 Services for doing cross browser testing. Cross […]

Running Selenium automation using Sauce Labs: Part 3

Problem: Different test runs require different configuration on Sauce Labs. In this post, we will show you how to make your automated test runs to use specific configuration parameters of Sauce Labs. TWEAKING SAUCE LABS CONFIGURATION Some nightly automated selenium checks that we run at Qxf2 Services need to be run only on specific browsers. Further some of our nightly […]

Running Selenium automation using Sauce Labs: Part I

Problem: Maintaining infrastructure for automated Selenium cross browser tests is time consuming. At Qxf2 Services, we use Selenium and Python for UI testing of web applications. Recently, we began using Sauce Labs to run our automated tests against different browsers. Sauce Labs cloud testing platform allows you to test web applications on 200+ browsers and platforms. They support the major […]

Client-User balance

Takeaway: Clients and users are not always the same entity. Clients pay for the product. Users use the product. Clients and users can have different success criteria for your product. Client-User balance Clients and users may not always have overlapping needs. Clients and users can have different success criteria for your product. As the client, I may care about: * […]