3 ways not to use Selenium
summary
Three concrete refactors replace bulky Selenium setup with backend calls: direct DB writes, REST API posts, or HTML form injection captured from Chrome and replayed. Replacing UI login with an HTTP client (using Apache HttpClient) saves about 1.7 seconds per test, cuts an API suite from ~90s to 8s, and lowers daily cost by roughly $100. A Learn UI suite of 700+ tests runs parallelized with Selenium for only ~4 minutes total; cookie/nonce extraction is used to seed browser sessions.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction and fire story
- 3:22Lessons from fire to testing
- 7:41Selenium usage at Blackboard
- 13:38Refactoring for efficiency
- 17:37When to reduce Selenium
- 23:35Methods for data setup
- 29:03Code example: HTML injection
- 32:51Conclusion and resources
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