Question

I just wanted some opinions from people that have run Selenium (http://selenium.openqa.org) I have had a lot of experience with WaTiN and even wrote a recording suite for it. I had it producing some well-structured code but being only maintained by me it seems my company all but abandoned it.

If you have run selenium have you had a lot of success?

I will be using .NET 3.5, does Selenium work well with it?

Is the code produced clean or simply a list of all the interaction? (http://blogs.conchango.com/richardgriffin/archive/2006/11/14/Testing-Design-Pattern-for-using-WATiR_2F00_N.aspx)

How well does the distributed testing suite fair?

Any other gripes or compliments on the system would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

If you are using Selenium IDE to generate code, then you just get a list of every action that selenium will execute. To me, Selenium IDE is a good way to start or do a fast ‘try and see’ test. But, when you think about maintainability and more readable code, you must write your own code.

A good way to achieve good selenium code is to use the Page Object Pattern in a way that the code represents your navigation flow. Here is a good example that I see in Coding Dojo Floripa (from Brazil):

public class GoogleTest {      private Selenium selenium;      @Before     public void setUp() throws Exception {             selenium = new DefaultSelenium('localhost', 4444, '*firefox',                             'http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en');             selenium.start();     }      @Test     public void codingDojoShouldBeInFirstPageOfResults() {             GoogleHomePage home = new GoogleHomePage(selenium);             GoogleSearchResults searchResults = home.searchFor('coding dojo');             String firstEntry = searchResults.getResult(0);             assertEquals('Coding Dojo Wiki: FrontPage', firstEntry);     }      @After     public void tearDown() throws Exception {             selenium.stop();     }  }   public class GoogleHomePage {      private final Selenium selenium;      public GoogleHomePage(Selenium selenium) {             this.selenium = selenium;             this.selenium.open('http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en');             if (!'Google'.equals(selenium.getTitle())) {                     throw new IllegalStateException('Not the Google Home Page');             }     }      public GoogleSearchResults searchFor(String string) {             selenium.type('q', string);             selenium.click('btnG');             selenium.waitForPageToLoad('5000');             return new GoogleSearchResults(string, selenium);     } }  public class GoogleSearchResults {      private final Selenium selenium;      public GoogleSearchResults(String string, Selenium selenium) {             this.selenium = selenium;             if (!(string + ' - Google Search').equals(selenium.getTitle())) {                     throw new IllegalStateException(                                     'This is not the Google Results Page');             }     }      public String getResult(int i) {             String nameXPath = 'xpath=id('res')/div[1]/div[' + (i + 1) + ']/h2/a';             return selenium.getText(nameXPath);     } } 

Hope that Helps