More and more web page pages are optimized for mobile devices using a responsive layout. With the help of responsive design, the layout of the web page adapts to the different screensize of the mobile device to provide a nice look and feel.
A web page that contains lots of pages makes it extremely complicated and time consuming to test the layout for each page on all screen sizes from mobile devices to desktop computers. Besides the different hardware, the web page layout needs also be tested in different web browsers from Chrome to Internet Explorer in different software versions.
You can imagine, testing the responsive layout on different hard- and software is nearly impossible when you also need to test the functionality of the web page on the different test levels.
To solve this problem and to test the responsive layout automatically the Galen Framework can be your next best friend. The tool is developed by Ivan Shubin, is open source and based on Selenium.
Galen has an expressive language to define the layout of the page and it is able to verify the location of the page elements relative to each other.
To get a first idea about the tool have a look at this nice video.
Galen tests can be executed in various languages and is providing a Java API as well. If you like you can execute the tests on a Selenium Grid and even on Sauce Labs.
At the end of the test run, Galen is generating a nice report with screenshots, error reports and detailed descriptions of the executed test.
As a good starting point check this really great tutorial at http://galenframework.com/docs/tutorial-first-project/. If you like to see the complete Galen specification language guide check this page http://galenframework.com/docs/reference-galen-spec-language-guide/.
The developer of Galen is providing several great tutorials about the configuration and the usage of the tools on his web page http://mindengine.net/category/galen/.
If your web page is responsive and you want to automate this testing task, Galen is the framework to use in order to safe lots of time during the development process. Get the latest version of Galen from here.
Thanks to Rudolf Groetz who mentioned the Galen Framework on Twitter and on the blog of the Vienna Mobile Quality Crew (german).
Happy Testing!