Author: Vipul Gupta

In today’s digital landscape, websites are brimming with dynamic content, captivating users with interactive experiences. A notable feature is the frequent emergence of new windows and tabs triggered by specific actions taken by users. These dynamic elements play a vital role in enhancing user engagement and providing seamless navigation.

As an automation tester, encountering scenarios where multiple windows or tabs need to be handled within an end-to-end flow is a common occurrence. Successfully managing this dynamic behavior becomes essential to ensure the accuracy and reliability of your automated tests.

As automation testers, many times, we reminisce about what is going on behind the scenes after the URL is passed to the web browser. What happens once the browser requests to load a website, or how does it know whether its request has been accepted and is ready to be fulfilled or not.

The answer to these is the HTTP response status codes for the resource APIs executed on the backend for the website. The request goes to the website server, which tells the browser through these numeric codes whether it is successful or not.

We often access a website on our browser, which works fine. But when you try to access the same while automating it using Selenium WebDriver, the website is not loaded, and the browser shows a security error like “The connection is not secure” or “This connection is Untrusted.”

The reason for this is the missing SSL certificates used to add a layer of security to the website.

Users expect new features and websites to be seamless and user-friendly when they go live. End-to-end website testing in local infrastructure becomes an unspoken critical requirement for this. However, if this test is performed later or after the entire website, or app, has been developed, the possibility of bugs and code issues increases. Such issues can do more damage than we can ever think of.

According to a report by HubSpot, 88% of users are less likely to return to the website after a bad user experience. As much as $2.6 Billion is lost each year due to slow-loading websites and images on them if it takes more than an average of two seconds. Also, up to 8/10 users stop visiting a website if it is incompatible with their device. A mere look at these numbers is terrifying due to the cost and effort involved in fixing these at a later stage, in addition to the customer base lost due to bad impressions and first experiences.

Have you ever wondered how frustrating it would be if you had to log in each time you wanted to view your Facebook profile? Or in a multiple-choice question where you’d like to mark many options but can’t? Or do you have to enter your card information each time you make a payment since you can’t save it?

These are only a few of the numerous instances on web pages where quick functionality might be useful. Stay logged in for a while, save card details, and much more with a simple click. Basically, it’s a technique to turn things on and off while allowing for multi-selection.

While working on any UI functionality, I tend to aspire for more and more logs and reporting. This happens especially when performing test automation on web pages. Testing such websites means interacting with several web elements, which would require a lot of movement from one page to another, from one function to another.

Now, having stated the problem statement and scenario it occurs in, the next question would be how to do it. Is there any tool or means to fulfill this requirement? The answer is YES!