Automated driver management for Selenium WebDriver

Abstract

Selenium WebDriver is a framework used to control web browsers automatically. It provides a cross-browser Application Programming Interface (API) for different languages (e.g., Java, Python, or JavaScript) that allows automatic navigation, user impersonation, and verification of web applications. Internally, Selenium WebDriver makes use of the native automation support of each browser. Hence, a platform-dependent binary file (the so-called driver) must be placed between the Selenium WebDriver script and the browser to support this native communication. The management (i.e., download, setup, and maintenance) of these drivers is cumbersome for practitioners. This paper provides a complete methodology to automate this management process. Particularly, we present WebDriver-Manager, the reference tool implementing this methodology. WebDriverManager provides different execution methods: as a Java dependency, as a Command-Line Interface (CLI) tool, as a server, as a Docker container, and as a Java agent. To provide empirical validation of the proposed approach, we surveyed the Web-DriverManager users. The aim of this study is twofold. First, we assessed the extent to which WebDriverManager is adopted and used. Second, we evaluated the WebDriverManager API following Clarke's usability dimensions. A total of 148 participants worldwide completed this survey in 2020. The results show a remarkable assessment of the automation capabilities and API usability of Web-DriverManager by Java users, but a scarce adoption for other languages.

Challenges of End-to-End Testing with Selenium WebDriver and How to Face Them: A Survey

“…Other participants also pinpoint the problems due to managing the continuously updated browsers' drivers, Selenium versions, and ever-changing browser versions. To mitigate this problem recently, the tool WebDriverManager has been proposed [13] and evaluated [53].…”

“…Each browser vendor provides a specific driver for each browser's version (e.g., for Chrome version 107, ChromeDriver 107.0.5304.62 must be used). Thus, to run and keep a test suite updated over time, it is necessary to download the driver corresponding to the browser version and keep the versions browser-driver aligned during the natural evolution of the browsers since modern browsers automatically upgrade to the next stable version [13] [14]. Developers usually perform this alignment task manually, which becomes even more tiring (and expensive) if the developed test suite is multi-browser.…”

Solving a Problem of Ui-Based Flaky Tests on Web Applications

“…Помимо этого, для стабильной работы автоматизированных тестов пользовательского интерфейса необходима совместимость версий браузера и драйвера (Selenium WebDriver). С этой целью в проект была интегрирована библиотека WebDriverManager [12], с помощью которой можно загружать любую версию драйвера для наиболее популярных браузеров. Также, с помощью библиотеки, удалось решить проблему обновления драйвера на удаленных узлах Jenkins.…”

VSC-WebGPU: A Selenium-based VS Code Extension For Local Edit And Cloud Compilation on WebGPU

“…The headless mode means the browser is visible to users, and the headless mode means that the browser launches as a daemon process, which is not visible to users [5]. 1 Selenium has been released to different language platforms like Python, JavaScript, Java, and PHP [6]. It facilitates every language to simulate exactly what a human may do on browsers and is widely used for workers to submit work without operating on the website themselves.…”