AI-Automation

Case Study:

Hi, does any one have experience using artificial intelligence with selenium for test automation? if yes, could you point me to some resources that have helped you to do this?

We would want to use AI to help us find elements on the screen in cases where Selenium by itself can't find it (e.g. if there is a change in the UI). We were using a paid tool that provided this feature which was very helpful. However, in a recent update, they moved the AI feature to an add-on which we would have to pay extra for. So we are trying to find an alternative since this will cost us extra. You can add this to the ai channel.

Recommendation 2:

The paid tool that earlier helped you to find a missing selector in UI was only guessing next best selector based on heuristics and text similarity. It’s no AI. You should get Devs in your team or you should add appropriate selectors to the elements you are interested in. The problem where selectors were changed is because you are probably relying on CSS selectors which are meant for styling. You can add additional data-tags for your UI testing, having separation of concern.

-- Vinay

Recommendation 3:

It seems to me, at least, that using AI to find an element on the screen that should be findable with good old-fashioned code is a really good solution to the wrong problem. To pile on, I'll also quote Gerald Weinberg's Second Rule of Consulting:

It's a people problem.

Because we're technical people, our minds jump straight to technical solutions. More often than not, this jump is a cop-out, doing what we know how to do rather than doing what is most effective.

For the 90% of you who don't know me, I should add the context that automation is my technical specialty. It was the subject of my last two STARWEST talks. When I direct you to look toward people/organizational solutions, this is a statement against my own interest.

I hope it carries some weight.

-- Mike Duskis

Recommendation 5:

Can I ask, if there is a change in your UI, why is your development team not informing you of this? Are your QA and Automation folks not sitting in on the scrum teams to see what changes are coming down the pipe? As for the technical aspect? Selenium can find what you are looking for, you just need to tell it to. Years ago I wrote a scraper to do just that. It looked at the page, collected all the elements and compared them to a known list. But I got tired of the list always changing, so we changed up how we developed the software and joined the dev team on Sprint Planning and Retrospectives and their daily Stand Ups. Now we know what is coming and can prepare for it.

-- Chris Loder