Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

Today I grabbed another low hanging fruit. This time it is Selenium. I had played with Selenium recorder a long time ago; I got to use Selenium recently, in a previous iteration of the current project that I am working on. At the time though, I was using Selenium mainly as a way to quickly populate a form before I actually tested it.

Even using Selenium IDE in this manner, just too quickly populate a form for manual testing, it is a huge time saver. Rather than testing every 10 minutes, one can test every couple of minutes.

But today I started moving towards using it for actual testing.

There are some issues that slow down quick adoption of the tool though.

Selenium IDE is quirky in my opinion. It doesn't behave the way I expected it to behave. I expect that the test, after I record it, will be saved. Instead, I have to manually save each case. Also, it would be nice if one could easily move the order of the tests around in a test suite. I found myself in the last few days having to create new suites just to switch the order.

And there is a conceptual switch that has to happen as well. It was only in the last few days that I realized that if the task cannot be completed, that is a test failure, not the equivalent of compilation error.

But even with these small limitations, and using it in this limited capacity, Selenium has already saved me a lot of time, and helped to bring my current project to successfully meet a very tight deadline. It has also been helpful in debugging a hard to find error, and helped to speed up integrating the system on the deployment site.

So you are going to hear a lot more about Selenium here in the near future.