A Smattering of Selenium #139

Posting from the past into the future. Or something… (its a scheduled post).

• webdriverjs-with-jasmine appears appropriately named since it claims to be A standalone (includes standalone Selenium server (30Mo) + includes Jasmine) working example of a test with WebDriverJS and Jasmine.
• Similar to the above, but with Drupal and Behat – Classic
• How I[he] send notifications to the build breakers. using twillio
• On Code Review comes from the Food For Thought department
• Orc is a model driven orchestration tool for the deployment of application clusters. Sounds cool.
• upgrading hacked dependencies — doncha hate when you do this?
• WAVE will tell you have well you do against their accessibility heuristics. Its no guarantee of course, but its a start.
• And why is it no guarantee? See Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week.
• Dear SpeakerDeck; your embed method doesn’t work with WordPress. So here is a link to So, You Want to Be a Front-End Engineer?
• I was bored and experimenting with Py.Test fixtures here — and then got schooled in the comment section on how to actually do it.

A Plan to Drop Firefox 3.x Support

The support policy of the selenium project for Firefox browsers is to support the current and previous stables releases, as well as the current and previous ESR releases. At the time of writing, that means the supported versions are “10″ and “17″ (ESR) and “17″ and “18″ (stable channel). In addition to this, we are currently supporting Firefox 3.x too.

This is an official announcement that we are planning to end support for Firefox 3.x in the near future in RC, WebDriver and Core/IDE, and this is your chance to be involved in that decision. Unless there is a strong reason to do otherwise, I shall shortly be announcing a timeline for the end of the support of 3.x

Once support for Firefox 3.x is removed, the earliest supported Firefox version will be the ESR-1 release (currently Firefox 10).

Rationale:

Firefox 3.x is no longer actively supported by Mozilla, and this has been the case since April 24, 2012. Since this time, 3.x has dropped to under 1% of global Web traffic (0.62% at the time of writing according to StatCounter) Continued focus on supporting an effectively dead browser prevents the selenium team from using features in the newer releases for little benefit to you.

Continued support of Firefox 3.x by the selenium project gives the impression that that particular version is still a valid option used by the population of the Web. This is simply not the case, and it may mean that testers efforts are being spent fixing problems that almost no users will ever see.

What you can do:

If you agree that this is the right choice, then you do not need to do anything. If you disagree strongly and have the numbers to back up your position, particularly if you can help work on Firefox 3.x support, then please reply to the selenium-user google group.

On a personal note, I know that a lot of you may well have firefox 3.x support in your test plans and will be distressed by this plan. Please take the time to look at actual usage logs from your sites and applications to verify that continued support is worth your time and energy before responding. I’d really appreciate that.

Selenium Conf 2013: Call for Papers and Early Bird Tickets

This year’s Selenium Conference is slated for June 10 – 12 in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. The conference will be held at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel. Similar to last year, this year’s conference will kick off with a full day of Selenium Workshops, followed by a two day, two track conference. If you’ve always dreamed of speaking at a Selenium Conference there’s still time to submit a talk to us at http://www.seleniumconf.org/speakers/.

As we have done every year, we’re pleased to announce that a batch of early bird tickets to the Conference is on sale now, even before the talks have been finalized. You can get your ticket(s) by visiting http://seconf2013.eventbrite.com/. There are only 45 early bird tickets available at the special rate of $299, and they are only available until February 4th, so act now! After that the regular price of $350 will be in effect for all tickets. You’ll also notice that tickets to our workshop day are for sale as well. These cost $75 and entitle you to attend a full day of Selenium workshops on Monday June 10th.

More information on the conference is available at http://www.seleniumconf.org/, and we are still accepting speaker proposals. We’re looking forward to seeing you in June!

A Smattering of Selenium #138

<insert snark here>

• Debugging For Testers — they don’t teach this in testing school. Actually, there is a testing school…
• A million times this!! That’s not BDD, that’s just Cucumber
• Faster Websites: Crash Course on Web Performance — all three hours of video
• Continuous Integration of iOS Projects using Jenkins, CocoaPods, and Kiwi
• Clearing IE’s Caches – Not as simple as it appears is another one of those things that gives Jim headaches.
• Speaking of things that give Jim headaches; Revisiting Native Events in the IE Driver. Fun, fun, fun.
• We’re Doing It Wrong! What DevOps Needs to Learn in Order to Scale Up. is pretty good, but wow I dislike this slide system.
• why GNU grep is fast – The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing
• Squash feels kinda like a wrapper about ‘git blame’ coupled with a log monitor, but still an interesting concept.
• Writing faster WebDriver tests isn’t necessary making scripts faster as it is about a clever abuse of the JS Executor

A Smattering of Selenium #137

Whoops, missed a couple days… ah well.

• MOAR ELEMENTS!!! the <main> element
• Dependency injection != Inversion of Control is useful reading. And the Waffle example is pretty funny.
• Not sure yet how I feel about this feature in the page-object gem.
  
• Waiting for an application to be fully loaded has some more examples of using a ‘proper’ [not implicit] waiting strategy.
• Most of us are not using Se for HVAT, but knowing the terminology, etc. can’t hurt – An Overview of High Volume Automated Testing
• The Exceptional Beauty of Doom 3’s Source Code – An ode to code indeed.
• Visual Studio considered Harmful. Or any other tool in your toolchain. You should be able to swap any bit up for one of similar functionality. The number of Eclipse programmers absolutely dwarfs the number of Java programmers.
• Centralized Selenium Logging with Graylog — alright, this is pretty trick.
• chrome-har-capturer uses Chrome’s remote debugging port to build a HAR file. Even works for SPDY traffic I believe.
• Opening a new terminal tab in OSX(Snow Leopard) with the opening terminal windows directory path – woah! AppleScript!

Source Control

This short technical note is to announce that the Selenium project is now using git on Google Code in place of subversion.

The move has been a long time in the making, and it’s largely thanks to the efforts of Kristian Rosenvold that we’ve been able to do the migration and retain the project history. The project owes him a huge thank you! We’re in the process of migrating the last bits and pieces (none of which are user facing), so there may be some last minute turbulence as we settle everything down.

Although the canonical source will be on Google Code, we’re working on setting up a github mirror. We’ll announce the location of that once it’s set up.

A Smattering of Selenium #136

Someone go back to my past self and punch him for thinking that starting to get in shape was a good idea. OMGCANTMOVE.

• .NET Goes Immutable seems interesting. But I don’t really speak C# so it could very well be boring and uninteresting.
• Shadow DOM 101 is another part of HTML5 that makes me think this web automation stuff has a very limited life span. Between this and Canvas… ugh.
• Using WebDriver to automatically check for JavaScript errors on every page is something I have been considering adding to my frameworks…
• Have I mentioned how much Canvas worries me? Snow in canvas land is an interesting post on debugging/improving performance on an little canvas app
• And in a similar vein, Why moving elements with translate() is better than pos:abs top/left
• I want to say that I’ve already linked to this, but I need it for a potential project so I’m linking it again – Modifying Python’s SimpleHTTPServer to accept directory aliases
• As a framework vendor I’m a bit worried about linking to Why Frameworks?, but there you have it.
• It both worries me, and impresses me, when people start needing to do Linux TCP/IP Tuning for Scalability
• Living in the cloud? Go read An Epic TripAdvisor Update: Why Not Run On The Cloud? The Grand Experiment. Now. The last link can wait.
• Understanding HEAD, HTTP/204 and HTTP/206 — What? You mean that there is more to HTTP than 200 and 404?

A Smattering of Selenium #135

Three in a row … of course, these are the easy three.

• Build, test and deploy Firefox OS apps for $0 (or any other currency that I don’t know how to emit)
• Ruby on Rails … in Bash. Because they can. Bash on Balls
• All you need to know about CSS Transitions except how the hell we are going to synchronize on them. Well, kinda does, but this is going to hurt.
• Speed Up Web Testing with a Caching Proxy has a speed-up trick I hadn’t thought of yet. And it also further complicates the moving parts in automation.
• Rails SQL injection vulnerability: hold your horses, here are the facts – I think every vulnerability should have a write-up like this.
• I hope I never feel the need to investigate an operator the way PHP equal operator == does.
• Now, investigating runners is something I’ve had to do a couple times. Reading MiniTest – part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, wrap up
• Using macros to create custom example groups in RSpec
• Hamcrest Quick Reference. Print it out and pin it to your wall.
• This. Is. Awesome. Mozpol – Provisioning Pandas

A Smattering of Selenium #134

Hrm. Office is closed until Monday, but everyone is in. Very confusing…

• One reason I have heard people say they don’t use cloud instances is they are afraid they will just sit around idle when not needed. Behind the clouds: how RelEng do Firefox builds on AWS has some useful scripts to find and teardown machines.
• Page Weight Matters is a fun little insight into how/why YouTube shed some of its heft. And a reminder that what we need is more stuff coming out of bandwidth starved regions since we have forgotten how to program efficiently in North America / Europe.
• Usetrace looks like the newest player in the Selenium-in-the-cloud space. Seems to use the Python bindings as the scripting language and host the scripts too.
• Did you know that you can modify the Se Server’s Grid functionality with plugins? Neither did I — or at least I don’t think I did… Here is a tutorial and another example.
• The interesting part of Whose bug is this anyway?!? is ‘Your computer is broken’ bit. Oh, and make sure that build machine is updated to what your developers are running…
• Modeling How Programmers Read Code is just cool.
• Speaking of reading code; Code Reading. I wonder if you gave this to a novice programmer if they would approach the above link differently.
• PhantomJS 1.8 “Blue Winter Rose” got lots of twitter love. As it should have.
• Cooperative multitasking using coroutines (in PHP!) is, I think, pretty awesome just by the my inability to fully grok what is going on. I also have no idea how to use this for automation purposes, but it seems like there should be some usage for it somewhere…
• So You Want to Write Tests is more mindset than code … but code has always been the easy part anyways.

A Smattering of Selenium #133

Since today is the start of ‘find a new contract’ I guess I don’t have an excuse to miss these for the next week or so.

(Oh, and Happy New Year, etc.)

• This is snark, but just makes me laugh given the hype machine around ATDD/BDD;
  

  AS an angry userI WANT TO punch the developer in the faceSO THAT I CAN punch the developer in the face.

  — Kristopher Johnson (@OldManKris) December 4, 2012

• Alright, this is also snark, but Why not make your URLs responsive? is an interesting ‘how would I automate this?’ question
• Adoption Of Exploratory Testing And Test Automation On The Rise is kinda sales-y [which is fine given the context], but if you swap in ‘Selenium IDE’ or ‘Selenium Builder’ for ‘TestStudio’ then you have the case for those parts of the suite.
• web++ is a single file webserver — in c++
• From 15 hours to 15 seconds: reducing a crushing build time is pretty good, though some very obvious developer tendencies sneaking in. The quick fix at the end, run the build entirely on the tmpfs in-memory file system seems in intriguing as well.
• Your periodic reminder that Simply Writing Tests Is Not Test Driven Development
• Javascript & HTML5 Game Engines Libraries – 51 Examples — and all will need their own unique automation efforts. Welcome to the JS Executor future. Honest, those aren’t thumbscrews you see on the counter over there. Why are you looking at the counter?!?!
• HTML5 canvas performance: Drawing circles — timing is something we’ll also have to care about in HTML5 apps.
• Falsehoods programmers believe about build systems. Yes.
• And I thought my brain hurt before reading display: none;. I was wrong.