Return to Open Source Testing Notes
- Taken from a recent interview in STP Mag
- Adam'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.
I agree in principle with Adams answer. Further, I believe that your background and experience are a factor too. There is a learning curve with this framework, it's not just a question of scripting language. People seem to want to believe that the IDE is a panacea it is not - it is a small part of what Selenium offers. The full benefit of Selenium is far more complex.