Is Selenium a fad?

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Kohl on September 14, 2007 at 8:11pm

I don't think Selenium itself is a fad, but writing open source browser-driving test tools is quite popular, and may be a bit of a fad. There must be dozens out there now. Back when we started the project that became Watir 3-4 years ago, there was Samie (Perl) and Pamie (Python), Chris Morris' Cliec controller in Ruby and not much else in the open source space. The market was dominated by very expensive, buggy tools from vendors. We wanted alternatives, using real programming languages, so we tried to do something about it.

As for fads, I think some of the test-first work with FIT is a bit of a fad, but FIT itself isn't really a fad. DSLs look suspiciously like a fad, along with the meta-programming people are doing in languages like Ruby. Rails is a bit of a fad, Agilism in many cases is a fad, and Erlang may become a new fad as well. (I have Ruby, Rails, FIT for Java and Erlang on my laptop, and the new old fad, Lisp.) :-)

I would like to see the same support you ask for in web automation tools. I also want to see more using real programming languages, with support in major IDEs, so I get the same tools the programmers take for granted. I want my web testing tool to be as easy to use as something like NUnit, and to integrate as nicely. I never want to try to fix some proprietary vendorscript that someone recorded months ago with Notepad ever again.

You're right, automated testing tools have a long way to go. Watir was one step in the right direction, so was Selenium, using different technology. But as you are getting at, let's not stop here. I will say that supporting a lot of different browsers and popup windows and all of that on different operating systems is difficult, and you are often at the mercy of the vendors who supply the programs and operating systems. People like Bret Pettichord have been asking them for years to make them more testable, and I hope they get the picture as they see Selenium, Watir, and other tools get popular. No, we aren't ranting in the wilderness, people really do need to test this stuff. This is a problem that needs to be solved at several levels.

Yet another open source browser-driving test tool project is coming along , and it holds a lot of promise. It has a programming API with Selenium-style back end for browser support: http://code.google.com/p/webdriver/ That is sort of a best-of-both worlds approach for me - the support of the browsers like Selenium, and a nice programming interface like the Wati* tools. This is one to watch, but appears to be Java-only so far. I hope they also eventually support C#, then that would cover most of the situations I have a need for, since I want to do test programming in the same language the programmers are using.

-Jonathan

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Permalink Reply by Frederic Torres on October 12, 2007 at 3:04am

Automated testing tools have a long way to go. Here is another step forward. It is called InCisif.net (http://www.incisif.net).

It's a web functional testing tool, using Visual Studio and the languages : C#, VB.NET and IronPython.
Comes with a record mode.

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