As someone who spends most of his working life building web applications, repeated testing can quickly become mundane. Even if I’m in love with the product, testing the same functionality over and over again can turn into a chore. Enter Selenium.
Selenium is a “Firefox add-on that records clicks, typing, and other actions to make a test, which you can play back in the browser.” In other words, you can write tests for your web application and Selenium will automagically run them with one click. It’s a full-blown IDE (integrated development environment), and within a few days we were up and running with a pretty robust test suite. Now I click a button and Selenium works its way through our stack of tests right in front of my eyes. It’s absolutely marvelous!
“Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.”
For example, we recently wrote a test suite for SoulPancake.com. With one click, Selenium logs in to the site, adds comments, leaves replies, uploads media, saves settings, changes its profile photo, and logs back out. Every time we make changes to the code, we can easily regression test all of these critical points of interaction with relative ease.
The first time I clicked the Play entire test suite button, my jaw dropped. It literally changed my life. When you factor in how much actual time Selenium is saving our team, which equates into real money, it becomes a no-brainer. We asked ourselves how we ever developed applications without it.
If you haven’t tried Selenium, give it a shot. It’s well worth the effort in getting setup and writing some tests. To the folks that contribute and help keep Selenium alive, thank you. Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help :)
filed in Design
With one click, Selenium logs in to the site, adds comments, leaves replies, uploads media, saves settings, changes its profile photo, and logs back out.
