What is Selenium? Selenium was designed as a way to create test cases through a browser(Firefox). The Selenium IDE is an addon to the Firefox browser. It's very intuitive to start recording and playing back use cases. There's a red button in the upper right. If the button is pushed, it's recording. You'll see your actions get added to the table in the action table. Once you are done creating your use case. You can play the use case back by pressing the green go arrow. To make use cases really helpful, you can make assertions of values. Just select an element and right click, you'll see a set of options, e.g., verify text present, wait for text present, etc.
You can export the Selenium tests into Java, and other, unit tests also. That's awesome!
I've found this tool to be very helpful for a number of scenarios. It has a very rich command set that has support for DOM lookups, variable assignments, and regular expression matching. What that basically does is allow for creating static tests that can run on dynamic content.
Selenium is easy for just about anyone to use. I had a business user whose comfort zone with computers ended somewhere near Excel, sit down with Selenium and reproduce a complicated issue that he had trouble describing. I also asked him to go through a typical day of work with Selenium recording. He sat at my workstation and put a good hour in performing his typical tasks. Once he was done I saved the test cases and turned them into use cases that were later made into JMeter load tests.
That's invaluable information to a developer. You're recording every keystroke and mouseclick that your users are performing. Instead of guessing how your tool is used, you're knowing how it is used.
Ok, that's not what this is about.
Selenium, got its name because selenium is a treatment for Mercury poisoning. Selenium doesn't cure my personal case of Mercury poisoning, but it helps with a lot of its friends. The thing I hate about my company's corporate applications is that I am constantly forced to repeat a very similar ritual every time I want to get something done. The ritual is like this: find the link to the application, find my password to that application, log in to that application, try to remember where to go in that application, go a few links deep into the application to get to the interface I want to use, then do whatever it is that I want to do. Everything up to that last step is a waste of my time. The only thing that is performed up to there is verifying my identity and letting me wander to the page that is useful to my task. It's a ceremonious mess. For a personality like mine, it's a mentally draining torture to accomplish a simple task. In terms of DRYness it's a soaking wet towel. It's horrible.
Selenium IDE is a kiln to your corporate applications' wetness. Instead of trying to remember the ceremonies, why not let Selenium do the remembering for you?
For example, my team now needs to fill out a help desk ticket to promote code from the development environment to the QA environment. This is an action that takes approximately sixty seconds to perform, front to end. The act of filling out the help desk software request takes about ten to fifteen minutes. It will also take another ten minutes or so for the team that promotes the code to get the request from the application. That's 25 minutes of ceremony to perform 1 minute of work. What a waste, even from our end we're spending 10 minutes of our time trying to communicate a simple request. A disruptive 10 minutes that only serves to record the request for the sake of our auditors.
I hate that kind of waste.
Fortunately, Selenium is the cure for this. All you need to do, is record the ceremony around your task in Selenium. It might take a little tweaking--keep looping through the actions until it runs without failure. You can add wait commands and change some commands to look for DOM elements or links with regexes. Once you have your case, congratulations.
You have just dried up a sopping mess.
Use this knowledge well.
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