Sunday 22 May 2016

Page Object Model (POM)

What is POM?

  • Page Object Model is a design pattern to create Object Repository for web UI elements.
  • Under this model, for each web page in the application there should be corresponding page class.
  • This Page class will find the WebElements of that web page and also contains Page methods which perform operations on those WebElements.
  • Name of these methods should be given as per the task they are performing i.e., if a loader is waiting for payment gateway to be appear, POM method name can be waitForPaymentScreenDisplay().

Advantages of POM

  1. Page Object Patten says operations and flows in the UI should be separated from verification. This concept makes our code cleaner and easy to understand.
  2. Second benefit is the object repository is independent of testcases, so we can use the same object repository for a different purpose with different tools. For example, we can integrate POM with TestNG/JUnit for functional testing and at the same time with JBehave/Cucumber for acceptance testing.
  3. Code becomes less and optimized because of the reusable page methods in the POM classes.
  4. Methods get more realistic names which can be easily mapped with the operation happening in UI. i.e. if after clicking on the button we land on the home page, the method name will be like 'gotoHomePage()'.  

Why POM ?

Starting a UI Automation in Selenium WebDriver is NOT a tough task. You just need to find elements, perform operations on it . Script maintenance looks easy. But with time test suite will grow. As you add more and more lines to your code, things become tough.
The chief problem with script maintenance is that if 10 different scripts are using the same page element, with any change in that element, you need to change all 10 scripts. This is time consuming and error prone.
A better approach to script maintenance is to create a separate class file which would find web elements , fill them or verify them. This class can be reused in all the scripts using that element. In future if there is change in the web element , we need to make change in just 1 class file and not 10 different scripts.
This approach is called Page Object Model(POM). It helps make code more readable, maintainable, and reusable.

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