This document provides an overview of Selenium, an open source automated web testing tool. It discusses the different components of Selenium including Selenium IDE for recording tests in Firefox, Selenium RC for running tests on multiple browsers, and Selenium Grid for distributed testing. The document demonstrates how to record, playback, and code tests using Selenium and covers reporting, advanced topics like data-driven testing, and alternatives for load testing.

1. Automated Web Testing with Selenium By Jodie Miners Presented to SBTUG 30 September 2009

2. What is Selenium? It’s Free and Open Source It originally came from Thoughtworks It comes in 3 flavours IDE (Integrated Development Environment) – for recording test cases in Firefox RC (Remote Control) – for running automated tests on any browser Grid – for large scale test runs of multiple tests in parallel You can get it here http://www.seleniumhq.org/ “Selenium tests run directly in a browser, just as real users do”

3. Why use Selenium You are always doing the same steps over and over again You need to get to the last step in a wizard to test that step You want to pre-fill some dummy data Formal Functional and Regression Testing Load Testing *

4. Selenium IDE A Firefox add-on that allows you to record tests for playing back in any browser. Very simple to use Allows non developers to get up and running with automated testing very quickly Then they can pass on to developers for refinement or inclusion into a continuous build system Can extend it easily with a little bit of HTML knowledge

5. Recording and Playback First Decide what you are testing and work out your test case(s) IDE Demo Record a test Play back a test Debug a test Step through a test Capture screen shot Asserts

6. Selenese The language of selenium. It is quite easy to learn 3 parts to it Command – eg Type Locator – eg Input Box Value – eg “ABC” Can easily be written in HTML Things to help build the IDE tests Assert / Wait for Page to Load / Verify Text Present / Verify element present on each page Slow things down with pauses and timeouts Step through firs then run, add pauses and wait’s if it fails because it’s going too fast Add think times

7. Selenese Locators Can Locate page elements by the following 4 methods ID, DOM, Xpath, CSS IDE recorderwill choose the best one to use, or you can choose which ever method if you are coding the tests. Can also use Wildcards and Regular Expressions See http://seleniumhq.org/docs/04_selenese_commands.html for more info - it’s very comprehensive Install Firebug to help with working out the locators

8. Selenium RC Takes a little time and effort to get it up and running Can then run your tests scripts from IDE in different browsers With good results reporting Or write the tests in code and automate the testing even further Issues Need to Install and use Java Very command line / batch file based Selenium RC Demo

9. Demo Run the test in Firefox Run the test in IE Run the test in Chrome Note that they are all in sequence

10. Coding your tests Coding of Selenium testing can be done in Java, Ruby, Groovy, C#, Perl, PHP, Python Most examples are Java or Ruby, not that many people using C# Add If statements Eg if stock exists then add to cart (rather than having an error message) Add looping statements For each product found, add to cart Easier to add parameterisation or data driven tests eg have a list of products in a file or table – add each of the products to the cart (you can do data driven tests in IDE – see here http://wiki.openqa.org/display/SEL/datadriven ) Multiple test runs Run the test 4 times, each time logged in as a different user Selenium Code Demo with NUnit

11. Demo Show the code Paste the selenese in Show NunitvsMSTest? Run the Nunit test Have one prepared ready to go

12. Reporting There is a great reporting framework if you code in Java or use TestNG Logging Selenium http://loggingselenium.sourceforge.net/ For C# these are the options: Just capture the Selenium output to a file Code a reporting framework yourself Use the Visual Studio Team System Test Edition framework Use the NUnit reporting I use a combination of VSTT reporting and some additional logging to a database that I created myself.

13. Selenium Grid Scale out the tests to run on multiple browsers at the same time Saves time in doing the testing But you need to rely on the reporting as you can’t watch 5+ browsers do the testing Great tutorial and demo here http://selenium-grid.seleniumhq.org/ Requires Java SDK and Apache Ant to run

14. My Grid Setup

15. Taking the Grid Further Scale out your grid to the Cloud using Amazon EC2 service Or use a third party service Sauce Labs http://www.saucelabs.com In early beta Uses your own code So can set up the code to either run locally or via web Current special US$100 for 5000 minutes Lots of Browser / OS combinations Test Environment Picture BrowserMobhttp://www.browsermob.com Time consuming to set up Some limitations on which selenium commands can be used Lots of options (eg can test with specific bandwidth limitations) Can be used as for http requests only, as well as real browser tests Around US$2.00 per browser per hour

16. More Advanced Topics UI Element mapping – How developers can make it easier for end users to build Selenium tests using element locator names that they can understand http://ttwhy.org/home/blog/2007/05/12/selenium-ui-element-locator/ Using Xpath references with the Ext-JS javascript framework http://www.xeolabs.com/portal/node/34

17. Load Testing Purists say Selenium is not for load testing That is mainly because of the hardware required to run multiple browsers on the same machine. I hit limits of 5-8 browsers on a standard desktop machine and 12-15 browsers on a server Use Browser Mob or SauceLabs to overcome these issues. Also as Selenium uses Real Browsers it requires real logins to simulate real loads – so you have to log in as real users on your system It does not do virtual load and virtual users

18. Recording in IE (just for @aussienick) Watin for .net http://watin.sourceforge.net/ Has a built in recorder for IE There are also Watir (ruby), and Watij (java) variants http://wtr.rubyforge.org/ Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition (VSTT) Visual Studio Team System 2010 Test Edition + Team Foundation Server Looks Fantastic Will also record and play back windows apps Must use TFS

19. References Selenium Tutorial http://dynamitemap.com/selenium/including a good video Full list of software testing tools http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html VSTT Quick Reference http://vstt2008qrg.codeplex.com/

20. X-Path References There is a great deal of help online for Xpath, here are some of the best sites I’ve found Xpath reference http://www.w3schools.com/Xpath/default.asp Some nice simple examples (on the Xpath tab) http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/QA/Selenium Quick Reference Card http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/QA/Selenium MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms256115.aspx Great tutorial with lots of examples http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XPathTutorial/General/examples.html Selenium Wiki Xpath reference http://wiki.openqa.org/display/SEL/Help+With+XPath