Selenium test development process

Hi all,

this is not a technical post. I'm using selenium web driver along with Cucumber and Jenkins as CI tool. In the end, after a lot of effort everything works, but I believe the needed effort is making it to "expensive" (effort wise) for me.
I'm developing and testing locally in code/test iterations. Minor glitchs sometimes put my patience to the test but the real pain comes when I try to run them on Jenkins. Many times tests pass locally and fail on Jenkins, most of the times the cause is related to the web element locators. For some reason, this is stricter on jenkins than locally. The turn around time here is huge: code, test locally, push to repository, run on jenkins, back to code...

In the end I take too long to put a test to work.

Does anyone has a similar experience, with a successful turnaround? what's the process you're using?
Do you have an average time for test development? (maybe I think I'm taking too much time, but that's just what it takes).

Thanks in advance,
Andre

Does the machine that you are running your tests from Jenkins got the same configuration similar to your local machine. For instance browser version, compatibility etc.,

Hi,

thanks for the reply.
Both machines are pretty similar, locally I have a windows 7 running Firefox 27. Jenkins server is running windows server and Firefox 27 also. My guess is that because this server is much busier than my machine some kind of racing conditions are causing this, but I would like to get some input from others..

What happens when you run your test on windows server machine with firefox 27 i.e out of box from jenkins. Does your tests run successfully.

No, its just the same. I might have used the Jenkins word in a wrong way. I just wanted to give context to what I was doing. Probably Jenkins has nothing to do with it. Most probably it's a race condition..

It looks like this may be because of resources / page load time / network latency on windows server machine.
You may need to try using explicit wait for the elements in your code.
What do you think.

I already have them...