Trivia:Selenium has a strong bonding affinity with mercury and arsenic, so if you eat

fish, it’s a good idea to choose types of fish high in selenium. But although it’s a necessary nutrient, more than a trace amount of it will have

you pushing up daisies in a heartbeat. (Or lack thereof.)

The name for the Selenium, the browser automation tool, comes from a joke made by founders in an email, mocking their competitor “Mercury” – since

selenium is a cure for mercury poisoning. The rest of the devs took it and ran with it.

What’s Selenium?

Selenium automates browsers for testing purposes, and also can be used for automating mind-numbing, soul-crushing tasks (like searching for “new” users in PUMA and changing their status to “active”).

The primary products are Selenium IDE, Selenium WebDriver (aka Selenium 2), and Selenium Server.

Examples/info based on using Java w/Eclipse ( v. Kepler has Maven integrated – Maven will import all necessary Se dependencies), Firebug (cool inspection tool), Firepath

Selenium Server needs to be used for:• Distributing tests over multiple machines or VMs at once

• Connecting to a remote machine that has a browser version that’s not on your specific machine

• Instructions for Java at http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/Grid2

Selenium IDE

• Runs as a Firefox add-on and can record, edit, play, and debug tests. • Can record user actions or be edited by hand, then played back as browser

emulation. It’s as though a ghost were using your computer! Aaaagh!!! • It can be experimentally exported in several code languages • Brilliant if you need to script a ton of crap, super fast (see February VA

move)• Creates a good, lightning-fast base for any automated, which can then be

coded as necessary• It’s a nice introduction to Selenese, Selenium’s set of commands

Record-><- Play

Run results displayed here

Selenium IDE limitations

• No conditional or looping statements• Limited to Firefox out of the box• Formatted reporting not supported • Uses html language – exporting in others is currently ‘experimental’ –

tends to import defunct dependencies and other extraneous crap • Can’t read from external databases or files

Selenium Webdriver (aka Se 2)• It’s a collection of bindings which drives browsers natively as a user

would, either locally or remotely with Selenium Server• It makes direct calls to a browser using the browser’s native support

for automation • Can be used in Java (recommended), C#, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby• Has WebDrivers for IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IOS, Android and

Opera. Chrome and IE require a separate server download.

Webdriver has a few limitations…

• Like everything else, has a few bugs• It’s Open Source – tech problems need

to be resolved through Se community, and you’re on your own to learn it• Can only automate web applications• No inbuilt reporting capabilities• IE, and to a lesser extent, Chrome, can

be buggy (recall that it uses a browsers native support for automation…..)

What can Webdriver do?

• Finding, retrieving, and verifying/asserting web elements by Name, ID, TagName, Class, LinkText, PartialLinkText, Xpath, and CSS• Mouse-based interactions including mouse position by absolute (using x,y) or

relative, clicking at current or specified locations or elements, click and hold, release, drag and drop, double click, right click• Keyboard interactions: Typing text, multiple keys (such as Ctrl + PrntScrn), key

up/down• Taking screenshots, accepting security alerts, locating/switching between

windows, executing custom Javascript, enabling browsers to interact with window alerts, navigating back/forward, implicit/explicit waits, downloading/copying files, permissioning files to be executable and much more both universal and specific to individual browsers

Success!

Generic success output – everything works as expected. Success and fail reports can be coded with as much or little detail as you like by conditional output to the console.

Example of failed test; element “Agout” not found.Problematic line onfailure trace, below – Assertion Error.

Selenium website – seleniumhq.orgThe website will tell you where to downloadand how to set it up (but not howto use it).

Helpful book on Selenium for developers using java: “Selenium Webdriver Practical Guide”by Satya Avasarala

If you’d like to use Selenium, make sure you don’t seek out any info before about 6 months ago. It always changes fast, but in the last few months has undergone huge changes. Search on “Selenium Webdriver”.