Selenium - initial impressions...
Submitted by Antony Marcano on Sat, 20/11/2004 - 18:26.
web testing tools
After a period of not being able to find the time to take a look at ThoughtWorks' Selenium I finally had a chance to do it - if only by proxy.
A very talented placement student was made available to my team this week so I took advantage of this by assigning her the task of conducting some experiments on my behalf with several open source web-testing tools.
On Friday we started looking at Selenium... I did get to take a quick look at the code behind it. Considering the simplicity of it, it is almost surprising that no one has thought of doing this previously. The framework is simple and the code is neat and very maintainable. Sometimes it takes a work of genius to find the uncomplicated solution to a potentially complicated problem.
The fact that it is all JavaScript makes it straight-forward to extend and building tests is relatively easy in the form of HTML tables.
Based on my brief inspection of the code, it looks like it should handle most situations... however, it will rely on developers adhering to some (reasonable) standards in their HTML.
It wasn't long before some basic tests were set up interacting with one of the web-applications in development.
Initial impressions are that Selenium has the potential to grow into a very capable 3rd Generation Test Automation tool for testing front-ends to web applications.
Well done to Jason Huggins, Paul Gross and Jie Tina Wang for writing it and to ThoughtWorks for releasing it.
A very talented placement student was made available to my team this week so I took advantage of this by assigning her the task of conducting some experiments on my behalf with several open source web-testing tools.
On Friday we started looking at Selenium... I did get to take a quick look at the code behind it. Considering the simplicity of it, it is almost surprising that no one has thought of doing this previously. The framework is simple and the code is neat and very maintainable. Sometimes it takes a work of genius to find the uncomplicated solution to a potentially complicated problem.
The fact that it is all JavaScript makes it straight-forward to extend and building tests is relatively easy in the form of HTML tables.
Based on my brief inspection of the code, it looks like it should handle most situations... however, it will rely on developers adhering to some (reasonable) standards in their HTML.
It wasn't long before some basic tests were set up interacting with one of the web-applications in development.
Initial impressions are that Selenium has the potential to grow into a very capable 3rd Generation Test Automation tool for testing front-ends to web applications.
Well done to Jason Huggins, Paul Gross and Jie Tina Wang for writing it and to ThoughtWorks for releasing it.