Testing web apps with Selenium

[eluser]Dam1an[/eluser]
I came accross this neat looking testing framework called Selenium.
Basically, it works by recording macros and then executing them as test suites and you can do all sorts of clever stuff (I've only just started using it, but it looks promisins)

Its a Firefox plugin (and I'm sure we're all serious here, and therefore use Firefox )

Oh, and don't worry, it doesn't use pixel coordinates for the recording

[eluser]ggoforth[/eluser]
that looks interesting. I'm gonna have to take a look at that.

Greg

[eluser]TheFuzzy0ne[/eluser]
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for testing applications in a consistent manner, but I found that I spent way more time coming up with tests than I did coding, and it was a real PITA when I changed my mind about something in my code. I guess that comes down to not following the 8 Ps to the letter.

[eluser]Dam1an[/eluser]
Yeah for someone with the 8 Ps in their sig, you sure break them a lot
I was actually listenting to a podcast on StackOverflow earlier today and they where discussing testing/code coverage, and the end verdict was that although it would be nice to test 100%, it's not really an efficient thing to do, as a lot of that time would be better spent doing something else, especially as some of the stuff you add is a few lines of code, but several times that much in terms of testing...

What I do is have 'smoke tests', these aim to test differant parts of the site, so if they all pass, I can be confident everything works. So if I have 10 very similar functions, I would just test 1, if that fails, I would look into all 10 a bit more, if that passes, I'm pretty confident they all work

[eluser]attos[/eluser]
It also works with other browsers, but the plugin is FF specific.

[eluser]slowgary[/eluser]
Testing is such a waste of time. Why not just let the end user do the testing for you? They're gonna do it anyway ;-P

[eluser]Tom Schlick[/eluser]
[quote author="slowgary" date="1243848513"]Testing is such a waste of time. Why not just let the end user do the testing for you? They're gonna do it anyway ;-P[/quote]

i hope your kidding lol. if not then because 99% of your users will not report the error. they will just get frustrated and leave. the other 1% will either try to exploit those errors or they will get angry and send you an email at 2:30 in the morning.

[eluser]Dam1an[/eluser]
I think the only time you can get away with making your users test it for you is if you label it as 'beta' lol, although if you leave it labeled like that for 6 years (I'm looking at you GMail) then the beta loses all meaning)

[eluser]Phil Sturgeon[/eluser]
Might have to give this a try. I normally test what I work on, but often I make such large changes to my codebase that it effects code elsewhere.

At work we have a testing team so I leave it all to them to worry about. At home I work on open source projects where you guys find and report my bugs. Both ways are easy for me but very very lazy.

[eluser]madeks[/eluser]
There are more of the Selenium than just a firefox plugin if you like.

You can write a code to do a more complex test with many Programming Language.

It is Selenium Server or RC something cannot remember.

It doesn't matter how beautiful or cleaver your code is.
If it is fail, the client will gone.