Web application testing with Selenium

I’m very excited about trying out Selenium. When I was at Spoke, I spent a great deal of time building up an automated acceptance test framework. We used HttpUnit (and JWebUnit) and supported writing tests in Excel. We provided a nice interface that allowed test creators to drop Excel files in to a windows share. The tests would then be picked up every few minutes, run, and the results (along with screen captures and application logs) would be emailed back to the user. It made test creation really nice.

… However… the only reason we had to go through this complicated process was because the tools weren’t great. There wasn’t a nice set of tools that allowed users to create tests based on their browser’s behavior (rather than Java-based emaulation via HttpUnit). For JavaScript, this became especially painful.

Yes, there are some commercial tools out there, but none of them are very scriptable via Java (which I want, given that we use Java and it integrates well with Ant, JUnit, and things like BeetleJuice or Anthill). And on top of that, they all require that you use their entire suite, rather than just their browser scripting tools.

I plan to check out Selenium in-depth soon. Hopefully it will live up to my expectations and we can start to apply it for some testing at Jive.