Automation Pain Points I: Synchronization

Let me say first that I love what I can do with test automation. It has definitely become an art over the years I've been doing it.

One of the very first pain points I encountered was with synchronization. In those days, I had to build my own tools. This is just before SilkTest went Beta 1. I tried sleeps. They worked poorly.

And when I started at Home Depot, I got into quite the argument about using sleep statements. A co-worker, Clay, got bent at me because I had put a sleep of 1/3 second into a routine.

Now, mind you, what this routine did was to poll for multiple different controls, every third of a second, until one of several conditions were met. He insisted "no sleep statements!". So I took him for a walk inside of webdriver, where it does the exact same thing. It was a good example of somebody following a rule because there's a rule, not because it was warranted in that case.

Sleep statements are not a good solution in test automation, mostly ever. My condition was unusual because there was no way to do all these checks at the same time otherwise.

But when anybody puts a sleep in a test otherwise, I call them on it. I know just how bad careless use of sleep statements can be. I have made tests take longer than necessary by trying to extend a wait to cover all the various response times from the application under test (AUT).

So instead, I ask folks to look at "how do you as a human know the AUT is ready to continue?" Is it because a field has become populated? We have an assert_not_empty() to cover that condition. Is it because a control exists? We have assert_exist() to cover that condition. Are we waiting for it to have a specific value? We have assert_value() to cover that one. All of these validation routines take a timeout as an argument.

I don't believe in rules for their own sake. In fact, I think the fewer rules we have, the faster development goes. Everything about our framework is about velocity. Reducing the time to build and maintain tests. Don't use sleep except in the most unusual of circumstances is one I do keep.