Writing and maintaining test automation is not always a smooth ride. There are numerous challenges that the testing team has to face to make software error-free. Even after the continuous efforts of the Automation team, sometimes there are test cases that show some technical issues.

Selenium is a reliable testing framework that most QA engineers or developers use to test web applications. Here, we need to know that no tool is 100% effective, and there are issues in every framework. So, finding the perfect automation testing framework will waste time.

Instead, we can find ways to debug and troubleshoot the test cases that show any errors. This blog will show you nine ways to make Selenium test cases error-free.

9 Ways to Debug Selenium Test Cases are:

1) Use Logging Utilities

Logging utilities are beneficial for users in case of issues in the test scripts. The exact location of a buggy code can be identified because of its ability to output various logs as per the target. 

Log4j is a framework with various components like loggers, appenders, and layouts. It is a java based open source framework that is useful to troubleshoot the technical issues in selenium test cases. It can be used for logging purposes by just importing the maven dependency.

Loggers have different levels and provide different severity levels for each log.

All, Debug, Info, Warn, Error, Fatal, and Off are different kinds of severity log levels loggers provide.

Appenders push different types of severity log levels to the destination. Appends are used to view the logs, and three types of appenders are available to output logs.

  1. ConsoleAppender
  2. FileAppender
  3. Rolling File Appender

           Layouts are used to format the logs. There are two methods available to do so.

  1.  Public Static Logger, getRootLogger()
  2.  Public Static Logger, getLogger (String Name)

2) Take Screenshots

You must observe it for hours to know precisely where and why your test case failed. This way, you will know where to make changes. But sitting for long hours with intense focus is not humanly possible. There will be times when the tester will be inattentive. To solve this issue, it is advised to take frequent screenshots.

When you have the screenshot of where your test case failed, it will be easier to debug and troubleshoot. If you are using Selenium as a testing framework, you can use the “TakesScreenshot” interface that the platform provides to capture screenshots of web pages.

After that, you can use the ITestResult interface to get the execution status of the test methods.

3) Enable Session Recording

If you don’t want to take screenshots, simply record the entire execution. Recording the session is a smart move because the execution time of a regression suite is way too long for anyone to sit and observe with extreme focus.

It becomes more difficult when you have to watch your test cases failing continuously. Most of the time, you cannot reproduce the failed test cases. In this case, a recorded session will be a great help. That is why enabling a session recording for future debugging purposes.

It is an advanced-level debugging option as compared to logs or screenshots. A lot of valuable information can be accessed using this method. You can know things like server performance and UI usability. Sometimes the bugs are found in the production environment. This way, you can share this information with other developers and testers to replicate the bug quickly.

Unfortunately, Selenium does not provide internal support or a feature to record the sessions. You can use a third party like Monte Media library for the same. This is a great feature that allows you to schedule the recording.

4) Add Breakpoints

Breakpoints, as the name suggests, are used to halt the execution of the code. You can add breakpoints at different stages of your test cases to check if there are errors of any kind. This way, if the execution gets paused in between, you can acquire the essential data elements from the source code.

The steps to add and execute the breakpoints are as follows:

  1. To debug technical issues, you must first set up the breakpoints where buggy code is observed.
  2. Now you must execute the source code in debug mode and validate the data returned to the debugger.
  3. Just resume the debugging if you have added multiple breakpoints.
  4. Stop the debug mode execution, fix the error, and deploy the code.

5) Debug Selenium-based test scripts on an opened browser.

If only the last few steps of your selenium test case fail, you can debug them in an already-opened browser. This saves a lot of time because if you execute the test again, time will be consumed to sit and observe the code. To debug the test code in an already opened browser, there are some things that you have to perform manually. You must launch the browser and perform web actions to see if it works fine with the test scripts.

You can use Chrome Devtools Protocol to inspect and debug Chrome browsers. If everything is okay, you can debug the code with errors. When you follow this approach, time and effort are saved, and the code is much healthier than the previous one.

6) Recheck the Environment

If your Selenium test cases are showing some kind of errors or technical issues, make sure that the correct environment is set up or not. Because if that’s not the case, you must install the latest/correct browser version.

Apart from the browser, there are a lot of other things that must be installed on your system. Install the latest version of JDK/JRE, selenium WebDriver according to your OS, and IDE like Eclipse or IntelliJ to write your test scripts. Once you have installed everything necessary, it’s time to set up environment variables for your OS so that Selenium WebDriver can be accessed from anywhere.

7) Simplify the Test Case

If your test cases are unable to execute, there is a possibility that the code syntax is very complex. You need to simplify the test case if you want your code to run effortlessly.

 Different things you can do to simplify the test case are:

  1. You can break down the code to make it more manageable and understandable.
  2. Carefully observe the test case and identify its expected behavior in each step.
  3. Use automated testing tools and implement assertions to validate the desired behavior.
  4. Automate the test cases and use Selenium API to interact with the browser.

8) Check Timing Issues

Your test cases may fail due to timing issues. It is a very high possibility because sometimes the testing environment may respond poorly promptly, or the test cases take too long to respond. To address this issue, you must ensure the page is completely loaded before executing your test cases. After that, increase the wait time for elements to load and use explicit waits wherever possible.

You can use synchronization techniques to check whether the element is present, and the JavaScript executor can handle AJAX calls. Use the right locator strategy and element visibility techniques to identify the aspect quickly.

9) Use Assertions

Assertions can be used to debug selenium test cases because of their reliable functionality. They are essential to writing selenium tests because they let the developers know whether an application is working as expected. Assertions are used to check whether a particular condition/ test case executes. Because if it doesn’t, an error will be thrown, and the automation team will have to resolve the issue.

To use assertion correctly, you can compare the results of the actual test execution with the expected one. If you know what went wrong between these two results, it will become easier to debug it.

  • assertTrue()method checks whether a particular condition is true or not.
  • assertEquals() compares two values and checks whether they are equal.
  • assertFalse() checks whether a certain condition is false or not.

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LambdaTest supports automated visual testing with Selenium and other test automation frameworks. The platform helps quickly catch visual bugs, ensuring improved user experience and better results. It also provides test reports and detailed logs to help quickly debug web applications.

Conclusion

You can be the best automation testing team in the world and still face some bugs and errors while executing. Mistakes are expected, and it does not matter how focused or disciplined you are as a tester or a developer. There will be times when your cases will show issues.

These test cases can become a crucial step in leveraging automation test scripts. When that happens, you must know all the techniques available to resolve those issues. In this blog, we have discussed 9 ways through which you can easily debug and troubleshoot your Selenium test cases.

Learning to write efficient test scripts is very important. But what’s more important is to know your options when things go south. Debugging your test cases with utmost concentration is a skill in itself.