Behind the Click

When I was a university graduate just starting my career, one of my first assignments involved using Selenium. I had no idea what to expect. I knew it was an open-source software testing framework used for automating web applications, but it seemed technical - something only experienced testers or developers worked with. So when my manager asked me to automate a login flow for one of our internal web apps, I felt a mix of excitement and curiosity about exploring a new challenge.

The task seemed easy enough to open the login page, switch the language to English, type in a username, and click the “Next” button. But once I started, I realized that websites are full of little things that make automation a bit tricky, like loading spinners, pop-ups, or elements that are not ready when the page loads. My first few attempts failed simply because the script tried to click on something before it appeared.

That was when I learned about a feature called “waits” in Selenium. Instead of telling the script to wait unthinkingly for a few seconds, I could tell it to wait until something specific happened, like an element becoming visible or a loading overlay disappearing. The test ran much more smoothly once I started using these smart waits.

The next challenge was figuring out how to “find” elements on the page. Sometimes, it was easy for a button to have a clear ID. Other times, I had to use XPath to navigate through the page’s structure and locate the element I needed. I quickly learned that simple, clean locators make tests more reliable. A messy XPath can break everything if the website layout changes.

One thing that helped me was breaking the whole task into small steps. At first, I tried to automate everything in one go and couldn’t figure out where it was going wrong. Once I slowed down and worked through each part individually, fixing issues and understanding what the script was doing became easier.

Eventually, I got it working. The browser opened, went to the login page, picked the correct language, typed in the username, and clicked “Next” all by itself. It was small, but watching it run made me feel like I’d unlocked a new skill. Seeing something that would usually take me a minute now happened in seconds, completely hands-free.

Here’s a screenshot of the actual script I wrote to automate the login flow

Keep up the great work! Happy Performance Engineering!

#Selenium #AutomationTesting #SeleniumWebDriver