A bit about Selenium WebDriver

Software companies attempting to become more sensitive to the immediate needs of their customers now measure their software development cycle in months instead of years. The time allowed for Software Quality Assurance to perform regression testing -- testing that the new features of the web and mobile apps being built haven't broken the old functionality -- has been drastically shortened. For software testers this has caused frantic twelve hour days and weekend work in the last two weeks before the product is supposed to go out the door. Selenium WebDriver is a free open source tool that has become the new industry standard in automated testing that can try to alleviate this problem.



Originating at ThoughtWorks -- an early proponent of Agile software development -- and adopted by Google, Selenium WebDriver has filled the niche once occupied by pricey commercial automation test suites such as Rational Software's Rational Rose, Segue Software's SilkTest, or Mercury Interactive's TestDirector and QuickTestPro. For a software company to get started with automated testing just five or ten years ago, the company would have had to purchase an expensive commercial software package from a vendor such as from Mercury Interactive to get Mercury TestDirector for  test management, and QuickTestPro (QTP) for automated testing. As an antidote for this, Selenium was built.

Selenium WebDriver supports many programming languages and their frameworks that help you organize your tests: Java and its frameworks JUnit and TestNG, Python with unittest and Nose, C# and its framework NUnit. Ruby even has its own version of WebDriver, Watir. From what I can tell, the combination employers are looking for is: Selenium WebDriver / Java / TestNG.

• Selenium HQ: Selenium WebDriver's official site
• SeleniumHQ Documentation: All about WebDriver, Selenium Grid, and some cheat sheets to locate web elements in your DOM (Document Object Model)
• Google Groups: Selenium Users: Looking for an answer to a question on using Selenium? Search for it here!
• Google Groups: WebDriver: For those who were looking for a more technical discussion on WebDriver. 
• Code.Google.Com Selenium Wiki: If you wish to get a deeper understanding of the source code, you can go here to get the Javadocs, Rubydocs, or Python docs. They even have a 5 Minute Getting Started Guide and a FAQ. 
• Blogs: Official Selenium Blog, Official SauceLabs Blog, Jim Evans - Ranting of a Selenium Contributor, 
• JUnit.org: The official site provides a list of Frequently Asked Questions 
• TestNG Official Site: Contains downloads for the product, documentation, and Selenium examples.  
• Google Groups: TestNG

Selenium WebDriver came about when it was decided at the Google Test Automation Conference that the first version of Selenium (2004) should merge with WebDriver (2007) -- two products originating from ThoughtWorks -- to become Selenium WebDriver (Selenium 2, 2009). Jason Huggins ( Twitter ), creator of the first version of Selenium, had joined Google two years previously from ThoughtWorks along with Simon Stewart ( blog ), creator of WebDriver. Jason Huggins went on to co-found Sauce Labs, offering cloud-hosted devices that companies can use for web and mobile application testing. Sauce Labs is also a backer of the open-source mobile testing framework Appium.IO. Simon Stewart, though at Facebook, still also works on Selenium WebDriver, and is attempting to get the WebDriver API endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium so that how it is implemented across browsers is standardized ( link to paper ). 

Selenium WebDriver uses various drivers to send commands to Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and other browsers and retrieves the results. Once you install the proper drivers, you can write code to find and interact with various web elements in the browser such as selecting links, sending text to a textbox, and clicking on a button... exactly as a user of your web or mobile application would do. Add the Selenium Grid toolset, and you can run browser tests on multiple machines simultaneously.

Although the shift from manual to automated test frameworks such as Selenium WebDriver can potentially save software testers from frantic twelve hour days and weekend work doing regression testing, in my case it has turned my life into frantic twelve hour days and a lot of weekend work as I attempt to update my skill set. 

Here are a few links that may be helpful if you, like me, are attempting to become more familiar with automated testing:

Selenium WebDriver

Automation Framework:

Selenium code -- whether written in Java, Python or C# -- is stateless. A developer can not pick and choose what will be executed first and what test should be executed second. Because of this, Selenium WebDriver is partnered with an Automated Test Framework like JUnit (2001), initially be built so developers could perform preliminary testing on the modules they were developing with various unit tests before the code is tested by a QA Engineer. TestNG (2004) was designed to extend that functionality.

JUnit is a unit testing framework for the Java written by Kent Beck (Creator of the precursor of Agile, Extreme Programming) and Erich Gamma (Author of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software). It allows Selenium developers to use methods to tag areas of their code like as @Before (where you can launch a browser before the test is run) @Test (detailing individual tests) and @After (Cleanup of the tests, closing the browser).  

TestNG (Test Next Generation), was created by Cédric Beust ( blog ), a software engineer at Google to extend JUnit's functionality.  

-T.J. Maher
 Sr. QA Engineer
 Quincy, MA