Go!

• Mentioned in #74, Automating Web Performance data collection with BrowserMob Proxy and Selenium is more than just a link to GitHub
• Of course you are using the excellent Requests module rather than urllib2 which ships with Python; but are you using envoy instead of subprocess?
• Grabbing Screenshots of Failed Selenium Tests uses some JUnit magic. Also, gotta love articles that end in How easy was that?!
• Rackspace Open Sources Dreadnot – Aside from an excellent name, its based on Deployinator which is pretty darn cool and I saw in action the other week
• Geeks and Repetitive Tasks. Umm. Yup.
• Officially Introducing “SST” that this link is here is evidence that I should go through the queue from the top of the list. There was a screencast on SST in #75.
• 7 Deadly Sins of Automated Software Testing – nice article and as someone who has done linocut before, that’s an impressive print that is featured.
• Introducing Selenose is a Selenium plugin for Nose
• Two useful Firefox plugins I stumbled on are FirePath and Firecookie
• Sorting a million 32-bit integers in 2MB of RAM using Python is this edition’s geeky investigation

One thing I have done in these Smatterings is to not link to my own stuff, but am going to start linking to an article or two at the bottom of the Smatterings (unless there is general community backlash against the idea).

• In Introducing PHPWebDriver I unleash some code upon the world

• Selenium Page Objects and Abstraction is one person’s attempt at writing down how they describe POs
• Running Geb specs using a separate driver profile to test mobile views in Grails shows how to create a custom Firefox profile in WebDriver
• Django and Selenium on Jenkins/Hudson (Headless) is yet another tutorial around xvfb but has a trick at the end I don’t think I’ve seen
• Python’s concurrent.futures is today’s analysis of building a script
• Browser Sedimentation has an outstanding diagram of whats what in a browser. I know I’ll be referring back to it.
• Airbrake seems like it would be useful — especially once you start parallelizing execution across instances
• Whole-team Test Automation: Making the Move offers some tips for implementing it on your team — at least according to the blurb at the top
• Hey look! Another xvfb think. Can we please just put this into the Se docs already?
  
• Selenium Webdriver, Perl, and Saucelabs also acts as a sample for the (a) Perl WebDriver binding too
• Convincing management that cooperation and collaboration was worth it – dark launches, config flags, oh my.

• As things like native-driver become more prevalent, knowing how to do Continuous Integration for iOS projects with Jenkins CI will become more important
• Chocolatey seems like a nice and big step towards managing Windows build slaves
• SST (Selenium Simple Test) comes out of Ubuntu and has a quick introductory screencast.
  
• Automate Salesforce Config Changes with Selenium is a contest. But only for Java so I have no interest in it. Submissions are due in two days. Could be fun.
• cssify is a great little app for converting xpath to css. Now to see what sorts of devious xpath we can put in and blow Santi’s mind with bug reports.
• Continuous Delivery with Bamboo Stages – I normally call these ‘chains’ but nicely shows how to chunk the march to production. It also cracks me up that the corporate twitter feed has the upgraded beer cart photo in the sidebar right now.
• One talk I skipped at Codemash the other week was on Apple’s UI Automation stuff. I suspect this is the low-level implementation of things like native-driver which is valuable to have at ones fingertips.
• While not automation related directly, if you are automating Android stuff you should also be looking at the Android Design site to understand the idioms and such that the platform thinks you should be using
• The road to faster tests is a fantastic write-up of an investigation into why their scripts were so slow. I’ve been doing this a lot recently. Well, investigating slowness at least.
• I actually got the above link from How We Reduced Our Rails Test Runtimes By 10x which is an even larger investigation write-up.

• Testing Facebook Login with Selenium has some nice Python helpers to dealing with Facebook auth
• VBS WebDriver – ummm, wtf?!
• Python Browsermob Proxy Library – the best code is code you don’t have to write yourself. (Thanks David!)
• I saw A Few of My Favorite (Python) Things at CodeMash last week and learned a few things
• def test = new BDDMadeEasy(Selenium,EasyB,Groovy) is a writeup from a recent presenter at the Greater Boston Selenium User Group
• Receive SMS alerts when a Selenium test fails seems like both a good idea and a bad one at the same time
• Have you always wanted to automate minesweeper? is such a good contest. We need more of these.
• Case Study: Building the Stanisław Lem Google doodle is interesting. And likely useful for others doing JS heavy stuff
• A neater way to use reflection in Java seems trick to me. Or might be utter hackery to someone who actually knows Java
• The beginning of a standard for browser automation makes me have this song in my head

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• Two Ruby gems
  • rwebspec-webdriver – Executable functional specification for web applications in RSpec syntax and Selenium-WebDriver
  • loadable_component – Ruby implementation of LoadableComponent
• A three-parter on building a framework showing there is more than one way to skin the framework cat.
  • Testing Concepts
  • Base Classes
  • Putting it all together
• Another three-parter on Is the Cost of Continuous Integration Worth the Value on Your Program? – part 1, part 2, part 3
• 31 Days of Testing – in 23 parts (though I expect the series will finish after CodeMash)
• The secret history of “about:jwz”, “about:mozilla” and the Netscape Throbbers is just a fun browser history read
• Pulling Jenkins’ strings with Puppet looks like a way of managing Jenkins instances through puppet — which is darn cool.
• Given When Then is a BDD tool for Node.js which does its post-conversion-magic runs using WebDriver (please stop calling it Selenium 2!) and Sauce Labs
• Selenium Utility Funcs is a list of python helpers (with slightly friendlier names) for WebDriver
• Converting Gems shows a neat trick for converting ruby gems into .deb files so they can be installed and managed via apt
• Since we all care about the web, Move the Web Forward – You love web standards. You want to give back to the community. Curious about where to start?

If you’re unsure about what’s been happening since the last time we announced a release here, the best place to look is our changelog. The most notable feature in 2.16 is better support for Firefox 9, but if it’s been a while since you’ve last updated, we’ve been beavering away on bug fixes and making existing features work as flawlessly as possible. Now’s a great time to update!

One of the key tools we use for assessing whether it’s okay to push a release is our continuous build. This watches for each and every change made to the project’s source code, and runs an increasingly vast suite of tests to verify that nothing has broken. Our friends at SauceLabs have been extremely generous in providing support for this, and have worked closely with us to make the build as stable and quick as possible. Special kudos and thanks to them!

• Localizing automation well is something I’ve seen people struggle with. Creating Multi-Language Web Applications with Zend_Translate is a possible solution for PHP folks.
• Using Spinach with Selenium and of course Spinach seems to be a different implementation of Cucumber. (And yes, I’m sure that’s a great oversimplification.)
• Introducing Android WebDriver more or less made the selenium search I have for twitter useless for a day-and-a-half with all the retweets.
• Selenium Webdriver – Wait for an element to load shows the difference between an explicit and implicit wait
• Testing GWT Apps with Selenium or WebDriver – take note of problem 3. Friends don’t let friends use GWT…
• The developer’s guide to browser adoption rates is the sort of thing anyone doing browser automation needs to know about
• integrate your selenium test cases into nagios – this is something I keep thinking I should try out.
• Continuous Integration Principles–Task Size Rules has a diagram that seems about right — even if I haven’t really thought about it in great depth.
• Another robust way of how to locate ajax elements using Selenium 2 + webdriver kinda looks like a re-implementation of the WebDriverWait stuff
• A tale of three ruby automated testing APIs (redux) was in an earlier queue, until he pulled it down. Now that its back, its back here too.

If you’ve been following @seleniumconf on Twitter, you probably already know that we have some early bird tickets available and the Call for Papers is open. We’re looking for everything from lighting talks, through traditional presentations, to half-day long workshops on anything that uses Selenium in any way, including building on the Selenium WebDriver APIs (so talks about Watir would be welcome too!). It’ll be a chance to show off what you know and learn from the experts. If you get a quiet moment during the Christmas break, why not put forward a talk? If you’re not a talker, but can help us with sponsorship, we’d love to hear from you too!

Just as last year, the workshops will be happening on the first day of the conference, but places are limited. We plan on running a total of four workshops across two tracks, meaning each workshop is half a day long; a fantastic opportunity to take a deep dive into a particular area of the project. The early bird tickets give you access to them, as well as the conference itself on the 17th and 18th.

The conference will consist of a main single track with selected speakers, with break out rooms being dedicated to an unconference, the contents of which will be decided by attendees. It’ll be your conference, help us make it brilliant

• As we start to transistion the web over the HTML5, I keep thinking about incorporating some ‘static’ checks into Se scripts. HTML5 Accessibility Chops: using nested figure elements explains some good (and bad) ways to use <figure>
• Jim took my nudging the organizing tests post I linked to last time and expanded on Organize Your Tests, Part II: Use Metadata!. I really like the separation of execution and organization which is not something I had explicitly thought about before.
• A quick screencast on using the IPhoneDriver and jQuery Mobile.
  
• A bash script to set up Quickstart as a continuous integration appliance. is kinda trick, but I personally would use something like Puppet or Chef to do this.
• How I Replaced Cucumber With 65 Lines of Python is full of build-a-better-lightsaber goodness.
• Is there a way to perform a mouseover (hover over an element) using Selenium and Python bindings? illustrates one of the lesser documented parts of the Python bindings: ActionChains.
• Ebselen is another Mavenised Selenium test framework
• Not sure if this applies to how people run Se scripts with Visual Studio, but Fixing Parallel Test Execution in Visual Studio 2010 seems useful enough to link to.
• The snowday formatter for RSpec is so unbelievably awesome. Maybe my frameworks needs to grow this for the holiday season. Hmmm…
• junitparams is an alternate runner for JUnit to enable more readable parameterized scripts.

• For TestMate / Java folks, TextMate-Bundle-Selenium-Java could be interesting.
• We’ve all made Oopses when writing / interpreting Se scripts, so it is important to remember that Mistakes: Transparency is Best
• Organizing scripts is one of those topics that gets both too much and not enough attention. Organizing Your Tests adds to the discussion — though completely omits using ‘tags’ (which his product supports…)
• Not sure how this will affect automation of Android or not, but still pretty cool.
  
• Being able to package up shared code for even just internal distribution is an important step in large scale automation. So, How Do I Create And Publish My First Ruby Gem?
• fog looks like it tries to provide a common api abstraction to a number of cloud providers.
• The Secrets of Successful Test Automation is a summary of a talk Lisa Crispin did recently.
• A Python Optimization Anecdote is a great step-by-step description of how a piece of python was optimized.
• Introducing Flow Visualization: visualizing visitor flow seems like a neat way to determine which flows through the app to automate first. Unless of course your visitors are jerks like me who have /dev/null’ed GA.
• And we’ll finish off with a cartoon – Development Driven Tests