December 15, 2006
Testing with Selenium
Selenium is a tool I've been meaning to explore for quite a while now. Automated unit testing tools like JUnit are great but only go so far.
For web apps, a more complete test coverage has to include tests via a browser. I've used HttpUnit in the past - it comes close in that it simulates web conversations. But there's quite an overhead in using HttpUnit and it can't compete with a tool like Selenium that allows scripts to be run in a browser.
Last week at OSDC Richard Jones gave a lightning talk that presented Selenium in a very impressive light. So, it's high time I got my hands dirty. If anybody reading this has used Selenium I'd be grateful for your comments on how effective you've found it.
Posted to Software Development by Keith PittyI started using Selenium a couple of weeks ago and have found it pretty useful for testing things that get a little long-winded with Rails Test::Unit.
Posted by: Ben at December 15, 2006 2:59 PMWe've been using it for about a year. It's fabulous.
We've not yet got around to plugging it into Cruise Control, so it still gets kicked off manually every morning on our test server. But we will, one day. honest.
The only real problem that we've had involves the Selenium IDE (which I recommend you take a look at). Some of the scripts it generates are not compatable with IE 'cos its XPath support is broken.
But Selenium had identified *loads* of bugs for us. We love it.
Posted by: Simon Brunning at December 15, 2006 11:09 PM