Challenges of testing Single Page Applications with Selenium

Single-page web applications are popular for their ability to improve the user experience. Except, test automation for Single-page apps can be difficult and time-consuming. We’ll discuss how you can have a steady quality control without burning time and effort.

With the benefits of having a thick client structure, ability of the Single-page app to mimic a native app is too dynamic for an un-adapted Selenium WebDriver tests. The problem is that Single-page apps have many components that are asynchronous from each other. While Selenium’s automation framework implicitly executes for static objects, the appearance of objects in Single-page apps is unpredictable.

To solve this you need to account for waits and elements going stale but there can be trade offs to this simple hack if. It can make your tests slow and fragile beside inflating the code. The nuisance doesn’t end even after these efforts and compromises. Often tests fail randomly due to Selenium picking up stale elements. This can make it flaky and harder to identify the cause. Sooner than later you’ll acknowledge the time drowning in maintenance which could have been used for improving user experience, growth and app usage.

Is there a better approach?

https://cloudqa.io/challenges-testing-single-page-applications-with-selenium/