How/When to fail the test case in case of exception occurs with Selenium WebDriver

Question

I'm using Selenium with Cucumber and also using Page Factory for good framework practices.

As we need to follow the principle of Fast Fail when we get TEST ERRORS/TEST FAILURES

We use Asserts in Selenium framework to handle TEST FAILURES which stops the execution immediately as soon as the TEST FAILURE occurs helping us in knowing the bug.

Here I want to concentrate on TEST ERROR reporting or understanding the implementation of it.

In general, Selenium will throw an exception if element is not found (When element properties had changed and WebDriver not able to find the element to do the operation)

driver.findElement(By.id("test")).click

Above code is enough to get the failure reporting. But If we use some generic methods as a part of the framework then how to handle or report the exceptions caused. Following a piece of code will illustrate my view on how to report the error or fail the test case in such scenarios.

Want to know the best ways to handle the exceptions and also want to know the code to throw the catch exception

//Need Feedback on this if block and catch block


public void clickElement(final By selector) 
{
    if (selector==null)
    {
        Assert.fail ("unable to perform click action as the element is null")
    }
    WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);

    try 
    {
        WebElement we= wait.until(
        ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("someid")));
        we.click();
    } 
    catch (Exception e) 
    {
         assert.fail("Element not found to click on element" +e.printstacktrace+)             

    }
}

What part of the code needs to be modified to stop the execution if click doesn't work because of element not found?

public void enterTextInElement(String value, String id)
{
    if(id==null)
    {
        assert.fail("Element is null")
    }

    try 
    {
        WebElement we= wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id(id)));
        we.sendKeys(value);
    }      
    catch (Exception e) 
    {
        assert.fail(e.printstackTrace)
    }
}

There are no return statements in both the methods I used, Should there be any? If so Why we need return statements as Boolean instead of failing the scenarios using assert.fail

Feel free to write your opinions about the best practices based on your experience.

Could find any straight article defining these queries. So It would be lovely and awesome if I can get some good ideas around this.

Answer 1

I want my tests to fail-fast. A test should never throw an exception. If it does it should break. If one of the first steps fails probably other steps will fail too, generating a lot of unneeded output. You will need to fix the test and run it, so you will find other issues anyways during the fixing.

Fail-fast is a programming concept that translates to automated testing pretty well:

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-fast
• https://martinfowler.com/ieeeSoftware/failFast.pdf

What part of the code need to be modified to stop the execution if click doesnt work because of element not found

You need to remove the try/catch. Only use try/catch if you want to handle to exception yourself. You could also add a Assert.fail('your message') in the catch if you want to give a better message to your errors.