User Interface Testing
Posted by Richard Sat, Jun 10 2006 16:41
Yesterday at NFJS, I went to a talk on Testing Strategies for Web Applications by Ramnivas Laddad. It was a good talk, but the main point I retained from it was using Selenium for user interface testing. I had heard and read a little about the tool, but I had not really looked at it (thinking it would be difficult to setup). After seeing the demo, I was really kicking myself for not looking at it sooner.
Getting started with Selenium is very easy. For your first steps, I would recommend Selenium IDE which is a Firefox extension. Tonight, I setup a couple of quick tests against a website I help maintain. Selenium IDE records your actions as you are navigating the pages in Firefox. It can even verify (assert) the presence of text on the page - using simple string search, xPath, DOM and more. Check out the screen cast.
Once you have your testing scripts (which has a number of export options: FIT, Java, Ruby, etc.), you can setup Selenium Core or Selenium RC to run on a number of different platforms and browsers (see Platforms and Browsers). Pretty powerful tool from the folks at ThoughtWorks who decided to open-source it (thanks!).
This is just the surface of what the powerful tool can do. Please see the documentation for more information.
