Taken from a recent interview in STP Mag
Matt's Blog
Question: Selenium seems to be having an identity
crisis. The Selenium IDE is the public face of the project,
yet very few active users use it (or admit to using it).
What's the best way to get beyond the IDE, and help make
the transition to using the real Selenium under the hood?
Additionally, how can we help make that change occur
with our testing friends?
- Michael Larsen, San Franciso, CA
Goucher Ya. We kinda got called out on that by
Bret Pettichord at the Selenium Conference. And I
don't think we yet have a good answer to that. Part of
it is education around what sort of things Se-IDE is
good at (rapid bug reproduction scripts or driving the
application to a known state to reduce startup time for
exploratory testing are principle ones) and what the RC
and WebDriver APIs allow for (data driving, integration
with backend databases and web services, random input
generators, sophisticated oracles, etc.).
But even that doesn't really cover it all. There is an
additional education burden to learn how to program
(well enough to automate) and to make effective use
of the various xunit frameworks that exist. And not
everyone wants to learn how to do this. A motivated
learner can learn enough Python to be effective with
Selenium and Page Objects in 3 days of hard work.
The trick there is motivated.
And not everyone is.
The key to a person's motivation is entirely unique to
them, but you have to always be wary of not inflicting
help upon them with automation. Some of the best
testers I know would not list automation as their primary
tool. And some of the worst I have seen do.
Circling back to the identity crisis, I suspect things are
about to get a lot worse than better in the near term now
that Selenium has commercial interests and their own
marketing agendas. Not to mention what amounted to
a declaration of war against HP at the conference. The
ramifications of that could be interesting.