Best Practices for Using Selenium Waits

Here are some best practices for using Selenium Waits which will help you in creating stable and reliable automation scripts.

1. Using Explicit Waits Over Implicit Waits: Whenever possible try to use explicit waits over implicit waits, explicit waits provide more control and are more specific and avoids unnecessary waits for all elements.
2. Choosing the right wait condition: Select the wait condition that is best suited for your testing scenario, Selenium provides variety of expected condition like element_to_be_clickable , presence_of_element_located and many more.
3. Adjust the wait time appropriately: Set the wait time based on the web application behavior that are long enough to ensure reliability but not too long.
4. Using Explicit Waits for Specific Element: Use explicit waits for crucial element to wait for their presence, visibility and are interactive.
5. Handle Expected Exceptions: Make sure to handle common exceptions like TimeoutException (which occurs when the element is not found, or the condition is not met within the specified time) and StateElementReferenceException (which occurs when the previously located element on a webpage becomes no longer available or attached to the DOM).
6. Prioritize Key user Actions: Make sure to focus your waits on the condition that are directly related to the most critical user interactions.
7. Regular Review and Update Waits: Make sure to regularly review and update the waits as your application evolves to ensure they remain effective.

Selenium is one of the most popular and powerful tools when it comes to automating web applications. Selenium is widely used for automating user interaction on a web page. One of the crucial aspects of automating web applications in Selenium is handling Dynamic Web applications and ensuring proper synchronization between the testing scripts and loading time of the website, sometimes the element we want to interact with is not available for interaction which may lead to faulty test cases.