Design Patterns beyond the Page Object by Derrick @ Selenium Conf 14
Channel: ConfEngine
Date: 17/09/2014

Design Patterns beyond the Page Object: An investigation into the design patterns used while building page objects. 

In an age where the Page Object Pattern and Page Factory Pattern dominate web testing conversations, there is still a need to understand and apply the design patterns of yesteryear. Ideas from the Facade Pattern, Factory Method Pattern, the Iterator Pattern, the Object Pool Pattern, and the Decorator Pattern all find their way into the Page Objects we build to represent the increasingly complex widgets found on today's websites.

In this presentation, we take it back to the old school, looking at novel ways to apply classic design patterns, like those developed by the Gang of Four and Code Complete, to new screen scraping problems. We will investigate three common scenarios where using the typical approach to page objects can be inefficient or difficult, including filling in a web form, iterating over data in a list, and traversing iframes to communicate with widgets. We will explore how to improve upon the naive approach to building these page objects through the use of classic design patterns. Finally, we will formalize our findings into new patterns which can be applied to more general scenarios.

Code examples will be presented in Python and based off of my work building automation tools for hubzero.org, a platform for scientific collaboration.

Speaker: Derrick  Purdue University United States