Test automation styles and alternatives to the Page Object pattern

Alister Scott has posted some code examples on watirmelon.com that show different solutions to a problem that arises for people implementing the Page Object pattern for test automation.

I found Alister’s approach solutions interesting, because as my automation usually models business/user goals and/or domain features/concepts,  I don’t often have my own page abstraction.  See http://gojko.net/2009/10/06/putting-selenium-in-the-right-place/ for an example of the approach I’m thinking of.

At the top level might be something like:


google=Google.new
google.search(search_phrase)


At the next level down, I potentially want to be independent of the user interface, so it doesn’t make sense to organise around page components.  I might have something like:


def search(search_phrase)
enter_search(search_phrase)
submit_search
....
end


When we get to the third (task) level, this is still at a user or business activity level, so the page model still doesn’t make sense for me.  I’ll just use the browser driver directly (or my own driver abstraction):


def submit_search
Driver.button(:value, => "Google Search").click
end


Yes, I could have another level here such as:


def submit_search
GoogleHomepage.search_button.click
end


In most cases though, the task-level UI element has a single purpose, so there’s not much of an issue with violating DRY. I also try to keep the automation stack as small as possible, so can tolerate a little bit of duplication. Regardless, it’s easily factored out into a new method if duplication becomes an issue because methods are common to the domain.

I’ve seen some frameworks that have a really abstract UI driver at the next level (so that they could drive a rich client app, a mobile app and a web app all using the same methods), but I’ve never needed to do that.

I favour a business/domain oriented approach because at the business level, the goals and activities don’t change that much (and I tend to let the automation lag behind my understanding of the problem).  It also encourages me to pay attention to the things that matter and be less implementation-focused.