Operationalization of a solution to automate web forms insertions in ...

Operationalization of a solution to automate web forms insertions in the Office for Quality Assessment of the Sport Sciences School of Rio Maior

Pedro Sobreiro, Teresa Bento & Rita Santos-Rocha @ESDRM Santarém, 06-02-2014

Agenda • • • • • •

Why this project Approach adopted for development Components used Examples Results Conclusions

Why this project? • Lack of resources and the need of inserting data in web forms of A3ES for all the teachers and curricular units of the ESDRM; • Lack of time to insert and rigid time stamp to develop the tasks; • Repetitive human tasks and prone to human errors; • Information related to curricular units and teachers already inserted in databases; A3ES - Agência de avaliação e acreditação do ensino superior

Why this project? • Solution develop with support and positive feedback of top management of ESDRM; • The head of the Office for Quality Assessment give the conditions for the solution development and supported the initiative; • The internal support and confidence was fundamental for the development of the solution and for commitment to get work done;

Approach adopted • No money to buy a solution leaded to the adoption of open source solution and the exclusion of other options; • Initially was tested iMacros, a free solution for basic features, but with the development of the project was needed additional features; • Selenium as open source became the only option to develop the solution to automate;

Methods • The solution was develop using Selenium as an interface to Firefox Web Browser; • Database adopted for warehousing the data was H2 (Hibernate) interfaced using the driver manager jdbc on the client side; • The plug-ins used were: (1) selenium IDE 1.9.0; (2) selenium IDE: Java Formatters 1.9.0;

Browser Automation • The automation was implemented using several Firefox plug-ins as interface to the application developed in Java: • Selenium plug-ins: Selenium IDE 1.9.0 and Selenium IDE Java Formatters;

Browser Automation • Additionally were installed third part plug-ins to facilitate the web pages analysis; • The automation of the interaction was supported with a mixed identification, using TAGS and ID’s; • Firebug was used for monitoring in real time the web page elements; • Firepath for editing XPATH and CSS3 expressions, facilitating the tests with web page elements;

Selenium components • IDE interface for saving macros and testing the initial interaction. • IDE gives a ground base and facilitates the development of the application to interact with the web form; • Webdriver gives access to the web browser as remote control, and permits “driving” the browser;

Selenium IDE • The comands for automating have two basic elements: command and target; • Basic commands: open url; type; verifyElementPresent; click; clickAndWait; @driver.get(@base_url + "/si/iportal.php/auth/login/lang/pt/") @driver.find_element(:id, "portal_username").clear @driver.find_element(:id, "portal_username").send_keys "username" @driver.find_element(:id, "portal_password").clear @driver.find_element(:id, "portal_password").send_keys "password" @driver.find_element(:id, "ext-gen23").click # Terminou a autenticação @driver.find_element(:id, "ext-gen531").click @driver.find_element(:xpath, "//ul[@id='ext-gen571']/div/li[3]/div/img").click

WebDriver • Simulate access to the browser as an end user; • The development enviroment used: • Programming IDE: IDEA Intellij • JUnit to drive the tests and asserts during the tests; • Selenium WebDriver;

WebDriver main class

WebDriver sample code

Webdriver database access

Results • Reduction of 90% of the estimated times for inserting manually the data; • 19 hours to inserting data non stop, reduced to 90 minutes – was assumed times for waiting for browser availability before sending data; • Reduction of error due to the elimination of human insertions;

Conclusions • Web browser automation solutions can help reducing time in repetitive tasks by human resources; • Can be used automating other manual insertions to web browsers; • Reduce handovers and non value tasks, releasing human resources to other areas;

References • Selenium Project. (2012). Selenium Documentation. Retrieved from http://seleniumhq.org/docs/book/Selenium_Documentatio n.pdf • Burns, D. (2012). Selenium 2 Testing Tools Beginners Guide : Learn to use Selenium testing tools from scratch. Birmingham; Mumbai: Packt Publisihing Ltd • Gundecha, U. (2012). Selenium Testing Tools Cookbook. Birmingham: Packt Pub. • Niemeyer, P. (2005). Learning Java (3rd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. • Bauer, C., & King, G. (2006). Java Persistence with Hibernate (Revised.). Manning Publications.