Conditions & Expectations

The pairing of Conditions and Expectations becomes the core evaluative logic of Qadenz. These classes are used to determine if the state of the UI under test meets a given criteria.

The goal of the Condition/Expectation pairing is to provide a unified structure for making evaluations throughout a testing project, rather than mixing Selenium ExpectedConditions calls for Explicit Waits, and various syntax patterns for test assertions. The resulting code is simple to read and quickly understand, and is easily maintained as the application under test evolves.

The evaluative logic behind Conditions and Expectations aims to answer the questions, “What is the current state of the UI?” and “What do I expect to see?”. Conveyed in terms familiar to testers, “What is the ACTUAL outcome?” and “What is the EXPECTED outcome?”.

A Condition describes a specific criteria to be evaluated on the UI. This could be the visibility of one or more elements, or the text shown in an element, for example. The Condition is used to establish the “actual outcome” portion of the evaluation. An Expectation, then, is required for each Condition. The Expectation will describe the “expected outcome” portion of the evaluation.

How does it work?

Each Condition uses WebDriver commands to retrieve data from, or information about, elements on the UI. Each Expectation invokes a Hamcrest Matcher that is used for the evaluation, which is passed to the Condition. If the the value retrieved by the Condition matches the value given on the Expectation, the Condition result will return TRUE.

Logging of evaluations is achieved by combining a description of the evaluation on the Condition with a description of the expected outcome on the Expectation. If an evaluation should fail and the Condition result return FALSE, additional information will be provided on the logs to illustrate the cause of the failure. This typically equates to capturing the “actual” value that did not meet the “expected” value.