Colin Charles: Selenium at the MyOSS meetup

I was at yesterday’s MyOSS meetup, and the topic was on the Selenium Web Testing Framework, presented by Yuen-Chi Lian. Here are some notes, and hopefully the slides and code make it up to the website soon.

- Java guy, who is a MyJUG guy
- Employed by CustomWare Asia Pacific, and is experienced in JIRA, Confluence, and Mule (are they an Atlassian reseller?)
- He started web development using PHP. Didn’t do unit tests then. As he started to do web development again, 2 years ago, he found that JIRA guys used Selenium to test their web UI. He started Selenium, last week :)
- A Common Web Development flow: analysis, design, development, then its testing… Unit test, integration tests, and acceptance tests using Selenium
- for web UI testing, Selenium helps you invoke a JavaScript method, rather than clicking a button to trigger it… These tests can be recorded and scripted. You can do it in a simulated browser environment, or use a real user agent
- He hasn’t tested Sahi yet, but he thinks its better than Selenium, based on the blogs that he’s read
- Selenium can be integrated with Continuous Integration (CI)
- Lots of examples using Java and Ruby
- Imagine doing FOSS development, on the Windows platform. It actually looks scary…

Overall, a rather basic talk, with a highly motivated/dedicated speaker. This being my second talk that I’ve attended on Selenium (last year at the Ruby Conf), and now, its pretty cemented in my head that I’ve got to make use of it, the next time I write a web-front end. Oh, it has great Firefox integration, with the Web Developer Tools plugin…

After that, it was off to Pelita for dinner. This ended up becoming supper, and there was lots of chatter… Drive home was eventful - on the way to Puchong, to send KageSenshi back, got pulled over twice - once for a license inspection, once to find out where we were headed. Odd. This has never happened before.

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