Selenium Grid on Multiple Browsers: should each test case have separate class for each browser?
I'm trying to put together my first Data Driven Test Framework that runs tests through Selenium Grid/WebDriver on multiple browsers. Right now, I have each test case in it's own class, and I parametrize the browser, so it runs each test case once with each browser.
Is this common on big test frameworks? Or, should each test case be copied and fine tuned to each browser in it's own class? So, if I'm testing chrome, firefox, and IE, should there be classes for each, like: "TestCase1Chrome", "TestCase1FireFox", "TestCase1IE"? Or just "TestCase1" and parametrize the test to run 3 times with each browser? Just wondering how others do it.
Parameterizing the tests into a single class per test case makes it easier to maintain the non-browser specific code, while duplicating classes, one for each browser case, makes it easier to maintain the browser-specific code. When I say browser specific code, for example, clicking an item. On ChromeDriver, you cannot click in the middle of some elements, where on FirefoxDriver, you can. So, you potentially need two different blocks of code just to click an element (when it's not clickable in the middle).
For those of you that are employed QA Engineers that use Selenium, what would be best practice here?
Answer
I am currently working on a project which runs around 75k - 90k tests on daily basis. We pass the browser as a parameter to the tests. Reasons being:
- As you mentioned in your question, this helps in maintenance.
- We don't see too many browser-specific code. If you are having too much of browser specific code, then I would say there is a problem with the webdriver itself. Because, one of the advantages of selenium/webdriver is write code once and run it against any supported browser.
The difference I see between my code structure and the one you mentioned in question is, I don't have a test class for each test case. Tests are divided based on the features that I test and each feature will have a class. And that class will hold all the tests as methods. I use testNG so that these methods can be invoked in parallel. May be this won't suite your AUT.