Selenium - Automated test with Random-ish data? Doable?

Question

So I'm trying to make an automated test for a type of survey. Just imagine a bunch of questions each page with some options like "agree/strongly agree/etc..."

Now the issue is, while the questions themselves on each page are always the same, but their order of appearance is always random. So I've been trying to think of a way to possibly put this is an automated test. (it was a task given to me).

Since the order of the questions changes, the labels themselves change...and TBH I'm not super familiar with Selenium (I'm using IDE) so I'm not sure how I would go about creating a test for this, since every time the test is run the order of the questions changes on each page. Also it's worth noting that one page of questions can be entirely different next time...so even on the same PAGE the questions that appear isn't always the same.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The first question is - do the questions needs to be in a random order? Part of being a QA is to give feedback on product decisions.. if it doesn't make sense, why is it part of the product design?

Given that there's a good reason why they're random..

If all of them share a similar div/html element ID, then you can use a CSS selector to grab a list of the similar elements, e.g:

By questionLocator = By.cssSelector("div[id*='question-']");
List<WebElement> questions = getDriver.findElements(questionLocator);

You can then iterate through that list to answer your questions. If it's multiple pages, loop this per page, like so:

By questionLocator = By.cssSelector("div[id*='question-']");
List<WebElement> questions;

while (morePages) {
        questions = getDriver.findElements(questionLocator);
        for (WebElement question : questions) {
            // do something with question
        }
        morePages = areThereMorePages();
        if (morePages) clickNext();
    }

You'll have to code some extra logic to work out whether you're on the last page or not.

This approach only works if each question is indistinguishable from one another. It'll work pretty bluntly, and you can randomly fill in each question, but won't allow for any logic - nor will you be able to do any recall of your answers.

If you want to do something more complex, you will need to capture some identifying information from the web element. I've built tests for dynamic questionnaires, and the approach I took was to parse a unique question ID from the HTML element, and then query the application API/Database with that question ID, returning a Question object with which I could work out how to answer that specific question. This allowed a high degree of complexity, including multiple answers, optional answers, different types of question, quiz completion percentages..