Action and Validation

One of the key principles of automation in Eggplant is ensuring that every action that is performed on the SUT, is validated with an expectation. A validation can simply be a resulting text or image being found. In effect, this is the same as a real user waiting for an event to complete before interacting with it.

The key benefits of this are

• Ensures the automation does not get ahead of itself or out of sync.
• Allows for variations in performance of the SUT (Network speed, system resources etc.)
• Provides a simple assertion ensuring the correctness of a test.

❌DON'T:

The video below, demonstrates what happens when validations aren't applied to the code:

• The user attempts to start with clicks followed by type texts etc.
• As each line of code is executed instantly - no consideration is made towards the behaviour of the system under test - and quickly fails (launching browser and entering url)
• To remedy this, the user tries to add waits to pre-empt loads times etc. This is bad as waits are always the worst case scenario, therefore causing slow execution.
• Hard Waits are a useful tool - but can negatively impact the speed of the script and are not flexible to differing load speeds and behaviours of the SUT - leading too a maintenance cost.

✅DO:

The video below, shows a significant improvement in robustness and speed of the automation, by implementing the techniques demonstrated in the Good Code example:

• The user has added "Dynamic Waits" (e.g. 'WaitFor 10,...').
• The approach will yield far more robust results.
• The solution will handle best and worst case SUT performance.
• The long term maintenance will be significantly less.

For a detailed breakdown of Image and OCR Searches, including Dynamic Wait commands, please refer to this link.

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A Summary of What You Have Learned

Using Validations after each action not only ensures the correctness in the test, but it also is a key technique to ensure that the automation is in sync with what is being displayed during the test.

❌Bad Practice Example

✅Good Practice Example

// Step 1
click image:"chrome"
wait 5
typetext "https://demo.nopcommerce.com/",returnkey
wait 10

// Step 2
moveto image:"Computers"
wait 1
click image:"Desktops"
wait 10

// Step 3
click image:"DigitalStormVANQUISH"
wait 10

// Step 4
click image:"ADDTOCART"
wait 4

// Step 5
moveto image:"Basket"
wait 1
click image:"GOTOCART"
assert that imagefound(0,"DigitalStormVANQUISH3CustomPerformance")

// Step 1
click image:"chrome"
waitfor 20, image:"refresh"

typetext "https://demo.nopcommerce.com/",returnkey
waitfor 20, image:"nopCommerce"

// Step 2
moveto image:"Computers"
click image:"Desktops"
waitfor 20, "HomeComputersDesktops"

// Step 3
click image:"DigitalStormVANQUISH"
waitfor 20, image:"DigitalStormVANQUISH3CustomPerformancePC"

// Step 4
click image:"ADDTOCART"
waitfor 20,image:"Succesfully Added to Cart"

// Step 5
moveto image:"Basket"
click image:"GOTOCART"
waitfor 20, image:"Shoppingcart"
assert that imagefound(0,"DigitalStormVANQUISH3CustomPerformance")

Images Folder:

Images Folder: