Testing with Selenium IDE By Nelz (a.k.a. Nelson Carpentier) http://www.nelz.net

Who Is Nelz? Software Engineer (Java/JEE) Mostly server-side focused Experienced w/ testing and tools dev Day job: Planet Out Inc. Volunteer: Burning Man Web Team Personal Site: http://www.nelz.net Sometimes contributor to Open Source projects: Maven, Jakarta Lang, Roller, CruiseControl (http://www.sfshenanigans.org)

Agenda Overview of Selenium “Suite” Selenium Selenium RC Selenium IDE (Selenium on Rails) Selenium IDE Demo Record Session Replay Session Hand Off Session Selenium As Black Box? Outline of possibility Possible Drawbacks?

Agenda Overview of Selenium “Suite” Selenium Selenium RC Selenium IDE (Selenium on Rails) Selenium IDE Demo Record Session Replay Session Hand Off Session Selenium As Black Box? Outline of possibility Possible Drawbacks?

Selenium Originally dubbed “Javascript Functional Test Runner” Originally written by ThoughtWorks folks Then open-sourced and re-named. (Inside joke: the element selenium is a cure for mercury poisoning.) Download all parts of the “suite” from http://www.openqa.org (This site also hosts Watir, Floyd, Frankenstein, etc...)

Selenium (cont) Runs tests in IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc across OS'es “Selenium uses JavaScript and IFrames to embed a test automation engine in your browser.” The idea is that you can interact with the JavaScript to emulate a user's actions on your site that is presented within the IFrame.

Agenda Overview of Selenium “Suite” Selenium Selenium RC Selenium IDE (Selenium on Rails) Selenium IDE Demo Record Session Replay Session Hand Off Session Selenium As Black Box? Outline of possibility Possible Drawbacks?

Selenium Remote Control Enables automated UI testing by controlling the full lifecycle of a browser, from starting a browser, to controlling it, to shutting it down. Runs the “Selenium Server” as a local HTTP proxy. You can “speak to” the Selenium Server in a variety of programming languages, which in turn “speaks Selenese” to the browser under its control. Provides client libraries in Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Selenese, JavaScript

Agenda Overview of Selenium “Suite” Selenium Selenium RC Selenium IDE (Selenium on Rails) Selenium IDE Demo Record Session Replay Session Hand Off Session Selenium As Black Box? Outline of possibility Possible Drawbacks?

Selenium IDE Presentation Focus (Demo Upcoming) Complete IDE: Debug, Breakpoint, Step Through Intelligent Field Selection (XPath, names, ids) Record & Playback (Easy!) User extensible Saves tests in multiple formats Dynamic info possible (Using JavaScript) Save Tests, Load other Tests Manual source editing available

Selenium IDE Shortcomings Firefox Only Long running session => Crashes? AJAX => Gets Confused?

Agenda Overview of Selenium “Suite” Selenium Selenium RC Selenium IDE (Selenium on Rails) Selenium IDE Demo Record Session Replay Session Hand Off Session Selenium As Black Box? Outline of possibility Possible Drawbacks?

Selenium On Rails Personally unfamiliar From the site: The Selenium Core files don‘t have to pollute /public. No need to create suite files, they are generated on the fly — one suite per directory in /test/selenium (suites can be nested). Instead of writing the test cases in HTML you can use a number of better formats (see Formats). Loading of fixtures and wiping of session (/selenium/setup)

Agenda Overview of Selenium “Suite” Selenium Selenium RC Selenium IDE (Selenium on Rails) Selenium IDE Demo Record Session Replay Session Hand Off Session Selenium As Black Box? Outline of possibility Possible Drawbacks?

Record Session Find that pesky typo “assertNotExist”

Agenda Overview of Selenium “Suite” Selenium Selenium RC Selenium IDE (Selenium on Rails) Selenium IDE Demo Record Session Replay Session Hand Off Session Selenium As Black Box? Outline of possibility Possible Drawbacks?

Replay Session Find that bug again Can use in development cycle when trying to get to a specific page.

Agenda Overview of Selenium “Suite” Selenium Selenium RC Selenium IDE (Selenium on Rails) Selenium IDE Demo Record Session Replay Session Hand Off Session Selenium As Black Box? Outline of possibility Possible Drawbacks?

Hand Off Session Sneakernet as analogy for Issue Tracking System “Selenese” a better “least common denominator” than verbal/prose communication Save off as script/program, add to automated suite

Agenda Overview of Selenium “Suite” Selenium Selenium RC Selenium IDE (Selenium on Rails) Selenium IDE Demo Record Session Replay Session Hand Off Session Selenium As Black Box? Outline of possibility Possible Drawbacks?

Possibility Have end user (internal) fire up Selenium IDE before a 'work session' Selenium silently records in the background When something 'bad' happens, you have a client-side record of what exact steps were taken Users can no longer “lie” about what they did Moves logging to the source side, reducing the need to reverse-engineer via server logs

Agenda Overview of Selenium “Suite” Selenium Selenium RC Selenium IDE (Selenium on Rails) Selenium IDE Demo Record Session Replay Session Hand Off Session Selenium As Black Box? Outline of possibility Possible Drawbacks?

Possible Drawbacks Memory Usage in long-running session Big Logs? Modify Firefox extension for this purpose? (Rolling logs?) AJAX? Multi-tab browsing? Only applicable for “internal customers”

Wrap Up QUESTIONS?

Wrap Up Thank you!