Common Test Execution Failures

Gotchas

Selenium, for the most part, is pretty straightforward. We can say that it is as simple as:

Finding an element and performing an operation on it.

However, writing the test scripts is much more than knowing just the Selenium API. It involves the understanding of programming, HTML, JavaScript, and web browsers. Therefore, cases may arise that can be confusing to newcomers. So, we will discuss the most commonly occurring errors and their solution in this chapter.

Test starts the browser but no execution and blank screen

If the test starts in the browser but doesn’t show any output, then this may very well be due to the incompatible version of Selenium and the browser. For example, the below screenshot shows a hung test in Firefox version 41.0.2 started by Selenium version 2.44.0.