sam.benskin.co.uk - am i missing something?

The first time i stumbled upon Selenium, i was amazed. Like many developers, I take a more relaxed approached to testing. Code the page, run the page, coke ok/not ok. It's a basic formula, but one that works quite well, until you start working on large projects with multiple developers for important, time critical customers; like we do at Bitopia. These type of systems just cannot afford to go down. Ever. This means that testing applications is becoming more and more important with each project we undertake.

That in mind, I was intrigued while researching into CakePHP again, that an article on wallsoft mentioned that the writer had created a way to export Selenium tests from the firefox plugin to a CakePHP helper for testing inside CakePHP. I followed the link and began looking into Selenium, and I was instantly converted. A simple Firefox plugin download later and I was up and running. It took me a few minutes to create my first test of logging in to an application, and then checking to see if the login had suceeded. You don't need to be using CakePHP; Selenium runs as a plugin in Firefox and on it's own can be used to test any web application or website.

The interface acts like a video recorder, monitoring what you click on, what you type and so on. The plugin records all this into a nice script that you can easily edit and add new items, such as looking for the presence of an element, or perhaps simply a piece of text. When you've finished creating the test, you run it and it visually runs through the test in your browser while you watch. It reports back to show what has failed/succeeded. You can then save the test, and start a new one. How simple can testing get?

Selenium also has the ability to run from manually created scripts you've written, and then run in your browser. You can even group many tests into a test suite and run that as well.

I highly recommend any Web Application or Website designer/developer to go and install the Selenium plugin right now, and start securing your project against failure!