Selenium Critique

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