How can I make my Selenium tests less brittle?

Question

We use Selenium to test the UI layer of our ASP.NET application. Many of the test cases test longer flows that span several pages.

I've found that the tests are very brittle, broken not just by code changes that actually change the pages but also by innocuous refactorings such as renaming a control (since I need to pass the control's clientID to Selenium's Click method, etc) or replacing a gridview with a repeater. As a result I find myself "wasting" time updating string values in my test cases in order to fix broken tests.

Is there a way to write more maintainable Selenium tests? Or a better web UI testing tool?

Edited to add: Generally the first draft is created by recording a test in the IDE. (This first step may be performed by QA staff.) Then I refactor the generated C# code (extract constants, extract methods for repeated code, maybe repeat the test case with different data, etc). But the general flow of code for each test case remains reasonably close to the originally generated code.

Answer 1

I've found PageObject pattern very helpful.

http://code.google.com/p/webdriver/wiki/PageObjects

more info: - What's the Point of Selenium? - Selenium Critique

maybe a good way to start is to incrementally refactor your test cases.

I use the same scenario you have selenium + c#

Here is how my code looks like:

A test method will look like somethink like this

    [TestMethod]     public void RegisterSpecialist(UserInfo usrInfo, CompanyInfo companyInfo)     {         var RegistrationPage = new PublicRegistrationPage(selenium)               .FillUserInfo(usrInfo)               .ContinueSecondStep();         RegistrationPage.FillCompanyInfo(companyInfo).ContinueLastStep();         RegistrationPage.FillSecurityInformation(usrInfo).ContinueFinishLastStep();         Assert.IsTrue(RegistrationPage.VerifySpecialistRegistrationMessagePayPal());         selenium.WaitForPageToLoad(Resources.GlobalResources.TimeOut);         paypal.LoginSandboxPage(usrInfo.sandboxaccount, usrInfo.sandboxpwd);         Assert.IsTrue(paypal.VerifyAmount(usrInfo));         paypal.SubmitPayment();         RegistrationPage.GetSpecialistInformation(usrInfo);         var bphome = new BPHomePage(selenium, string.Format(Resources.GlobalResources.LoginBPHomePage, usrInfo.AccountName, usrInfo.Password));         Assert.IsTrue(bphome.VerifyPageWasLoaded(usrInfo));         Assert.IsTrue(bphome.VerifySpecialistProfile());         bphome.Logout();     } 

A page Object will be something like this

public class PublicRegistrationPage {     public ISelenium selenium { get; set; }      #region Constructors     public PublicRegistrationPage(ISelenium sel)     {         selenium = sel;         selenium.Open(Resources.GlobalResources.PublicRegisterURL);     }     #endregion     #region Methods      public PublicRegistrationPage FillUserInfo(UserInfo usr)     {         selenium.Type("ctl00_cphComponent_ctlContent_wizRegister_tUserFirstName", usr.FirstName);         selenium.Type("ctl00_cphComponent_ctlContent_wizRegister_tUserLastName", usr.LastName);         selenium.Select("ctl00_cphComponent_ctlContent_wizRegister_ddlUserCountry", string.Format("label={0}",usr.Country ));         selenium.WaitForPageToLoad(Resources.GlobalResources.TimeOut);         selenium.Type("ctl00_cphComponent_ctlContent_wizRegister_tUserEmail", usr.Email );         selenium.Type("ctl00_cphComponent_ctlContent_wizRegister_tUserDirectTel", usr.DirectTel);         selenium.Type("ctl00_cphComponent_ctlContent_wizRegister_tUserMobile", usr.Mobile);         return this;     } 

}

Hope this helps.