Kelly was kind enough to show me Selenium today and I had to share. With most wizbang tools – if I can’t make it do something useful for me within about 20 minues I generally move on unless it’s something really amazing. Selenium is not only amazing – but I was up and running with the help of Sauce Labs in no time at all.
Selenium is a tool which allows you to build a script for testing a web site or application. It captures events as you walk through the site and creates a script to reproduce them for testing purposes. Just open the tool, click record and perform your test task . At the end you can have it run a bunch of checks to make sure you ended up with the output you expected. The really cool part comes with the ability to then run a server process which will execute your script in different browsers on other platforms to verify compatibility. Sauce labs provides a distributed service to run your scripts on all of the major browser platforms while capturing the output to flv videos. Once I had everything set up – it took all of about 10 minutes to build a test script and have video of it running in IE6,7,8, FF3 and Safari – pretty awesome and much more informative than just checking for css consistency between machines.