Selenium Blog

…and here’s the links!

• Henrik Skupin was one of the speakers at the London Selenium Meetup and has written about the night and his talk
• Speaking of which, videos of the talks are now up
• Part of good automation is knowing how to code. So here are some sites that crossed my path this week for that
  • Rails for Zombies
  • Dive into HTML 5
  • HTML5 Rocks
• Cheezy continues his UI series which takes a detour over to WATIR land, but things are transferable. Introducing a Simple DSL and Default Data
• Functional Automation is an important part of Continuous Delivery. Here is Jez talking about Continuous Delivery — beer in hand. (which to me is the most important concept of the year)
• Acceptance Test-Driven Development with Robot Framework is an excerpt from Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development.
• BidiChecker is a tool for checking bidirectional (BiDi) text. So who is going to integrate this into Se?
• Interaction with Flash using FlashSelenium and Javascript – Part 1 starts to show how to use FlashSelenium to interact with Flash-y things.
• Looking for a Selenium job? Have a look at How to get a Rails job. When I have hired, or help people hire, this is very true.
• And finally the whole should-testers-need-to-know-how-to-code conflict bubbled up again somewhat last week. Since this is my list of links: if you are automating, yes; if you are not, then no (but it can’t hurt).
  • Don’t call me Technical
  • The Future of Testing
  • The Future of Testing is Wide Open

Share this:

For those people paying attention to the goings-on in the Selenium world, yes, I am skipping something major until some of the details are worked out and announced. Until then, here are the links I accrued over the week.

• Selenium uses Bamboo for its CI infrastructure. This week saw an upgrade to the latest version so if you want bleeding-edge code, get it here
• The only browser Se has no real traction on right now is the BlackBerry one. But if someone wanted to tackle it, here is a post from Atomic Object on their BlackBerry development environment that would help kickstart things maybe.
• Under the category of ‘let the language deal with things’ is html5lib for python and php which will parse html. Sometimes it is far faster to dump your attribute checks etc. to a native parser than let Se do it.
• Scott Sims has released Selenium Fury upon the Ruby world. Think of it as a Page Factory implementation for Ruby.
• Using Se-IDE and Easyb? Here is a thread on how to use the generated code without modification
• JRuby is one of the better languages to use to write Se scripts in, and here are videos from JRubyConf 2010
• Cheezy is writing a series on UI tests. So far there is How do we keep them from being brittle? and Part Two
• Se2 for JS? Sure, why not. webdriver-js
• Jari release the selenium-webdriver 0.1.0 gem this week. Why the big jump from 0.0.29 to 0.1.0? We’ve merged in the selenium-client gem into the main selenium codebase and now there is a single gem if you want to do 1.x or 2.x scripting.
• Google Refine is just darn cool. I’m not really sure how it plays into automation, but I get the sneaky suspicion it could. Somehow.
• The YUI Test has Se built right in.

Share this:

The big news for last week was that I released Se-IDE 1.0.8 to very little fanfare. 1.0.9 should be a week or two and much more important a release.

• Cheesecake! is isn’t nearly as impractical as Pacman, but still adds to the Se2 example bucket.
• The London Se Meetup stuff from last week are starting to appear…
  • Client-side profiling with Se2
  • a summary
  • How Mozilla uses Se
  • Crowd-sourced Automated Firefox UI Testing
• Some notes from CITCON last week as well. Seems like London was the place to be.
• When designing automation frameworks (internal or external), the list of ways to make it hard to misuse should be kept in the back of your mind.
• Of course your automation is under version control, right? RIGHT?!? What the Commit is rather amusing, if not a scathing satire. (hint: hit refresh)
• Sauce Labs announced the availability of a CI API. But there is nothing to say that you couldn’t integrate their alternative annotation methods outside of CI too.
• Harry Robinson did a session at CAST 2010 on ‘Exploratory Test Automation’ (which I missed; no, not bitter at all..) and I found his slides
• If you are using the hosted Bamboo solution and most of your Se tests need windows, then here are instructions on how to create your own custom elastic agent image
• Here is something fun, do you Hate or Love Se?
• Slate seems like an interesting module for Python folks since it can parse and extract information from PDFs which is often a black hole in automation.
• I continue to maintain that automation is programming (much to the annoyance of the classical black-box tester who is starting out with it) and that perhaps the easiest language to start learning is Python. Learn Python The Hard Way is a new book which looks like an ideal way to learn the language. I haven’t really gone through it to see which parts are more (or less) relevant to automation, but…
• You’re cuking it wrong has lots of tips on how to write Cucumber scripts well.

Share this: