[QA] suggestions for browser test debugging

[S Page]

The Flow extension's features/flow_logged_in.feature fails for me asserting
"Then links to talk and contrib should be visible" after "When I hover over
the author link". I know exactly where it's failing, but not why.

Whenever a test fails and it's not simply due to a page element changed its
name or text, I have little idea how to debug it. SInce the cycle time for
a test requiring login is over a minute, it's painful to try  line-by-line
changes. I'm used to interactively debugging jQuery selectors in a browser
console, what's the equivalent for browser tests?

* Is there a way to break into the Ruby debugger when running a cucumber
test?
* Is there a flash() function to flicker the page element that I'm trying
to select, or a dump() function?
* Should I see a mouseover effect in Firefox WebDriver while I'm watching a
test that calls some_element.fire_event('onmouseover') ?

Thanks for any suggestions or pointers.

(Chris,
the Flow code changed to do a CSS animations on hover to fade in the the
links, so I tried adding a sleep. The hover effect is on the parent element
of the element that the test does a mouseover on, so I tried changing the
mouseover element. Neither helped.)

-- 
=S Page  Features engineer
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