Selenium 2.0 beta 1 Release

We recently released the first of the betas for Selenium 2. It’s available for Java, C# and Ruby. If you’ve been holding off trying Selenium 2 because of the alpha label, then the biggest improvement you’ll see is with the new WebDriver APIs, but there’s a lot more!

• A promise of relatively stable APIs
• For Firefox only right now, an API for dealing with alerts, prompts and confirms.
• A brand new IE driver.
• Better selenium emulation when using webdriver
• And a better implementation of webdriver’s API backed by the traditional Selenium technology.
• Ubiquitous use of Sizzle for emulating CSS selectors where native CSS selectors aren’t supported
• The advanced user interactions API
• An update to the AndroidDriver’s Android app.

Of course, we’d love this release to be completely bug free, but this is, after all, a beta, so there are some known issues:

• The selenium 1.x emulation using IE is a little flaky.
• The ChromeDriver is not as capable as the others.
• Anything in our bug list.

You can download it from here:

http://code.google.com/p/selenium/downloads/list

You can read the javadocs and the ruby docs.

An obvious question is “When will the beta end?” The short answer is when we’ve implemented the alerts and prompts and advanced user interactions APIs in all supported browsers. We expect there to be some flex in some APIs (removing deprecated methods, and within the advanced user interactions API) but what you have here is basically what you’re going to get when we hit 2.0 final. I have no idea how long this will take, but if you’re interested in helping out, let us know!

Thanks are due to all the committers who have worked so hard to get this code into shape. Thanks are also due to all the people who have taken the time to file bugs, ask for features and participated on the mailing lists. Thank you to you too, for going out and trying this new beta of Selenium 2.

You rock. 🙂

Atoms have come to Selenium IDE

As mentioned in Simon’s Going Atomic: Why? and Going Atomic: How, part of the merging of Selenium and WebDriver is to share common code between the two. And as of the 1.0.10 release of Selenium IDE, this merged code, ‘atoms’ is now included.

Some early users of this release are noticing that this the atom that drives assertAttribute and verifyAttribute is causing their scripts to break. This post explains the ‘why’ and suggests how to fix them as well.

The HTML spec has the notion of a boolean attribute which is one that does something just by being there rather than by its value; checked and selected are two such examples of this. Optionally, you could give these boolean attributes a value that is the same as their name (checked=”checked”) and your page would still validate, but really, the browsers only care that the attribute exist.

Prior to 1.0.10, it was not uncommon for people to do something like

assertAttribute | checkbox@checked | checked

which fetches the value of the checked attribute on the checkbox with the id or name of checkbox and fails the script is the value is not checked.

In 1.0.10 though, that will fail even if it is checked. This is because checked is a boolean attribute and will now return either true or throw an exception saying the attribute doesn’t exist. Redoing the above step check that the boolean attribute is set results in:

assertAttribute | checkbox@checked | true

Thankfully, most of the real-world interaction with boolean attributes is focused on checked, disabled, hidden and selected and in these cases using assertAttribute is not really the right thing to do. Instead, the Selenium API provides wrappers for you to use.

checked	assertChecked(locator), assertNotChecked(locator), verifyChecked(locator), verifyNotChecked(locator)
disabled	assertEditable(locator), assertNotEditable(locator), verifyEditable(locator), verifyNotEditable(locator)
hidden	assertVisible(locator), assertNotVisible(locator), verifyVisible(locator), verifyNotVisible(locator)
selected	assertSelected*(locator, pattern), assertNotSelected*(locator, pattern), verifySelected*(locator, pattern), verifyNotSelected*(locator, pattern)

Checking for the absence of a boolean attribute that doesn’t have a nice wrapper is a bit of a pain though. In this example I am checking that the boolean attribute multiple is not on the select element with the name elephants.

assertEval | this.browserbot.findElement("css=select[name=elephants]").getAttribute("multiple"); | null

If you find yourself doing this very often, I suggest you wrap it up in a user-extension inside a plugin as something like

assertBooleanAttribute | css=select[name=elephants]@multiple | false
assertBooleanAttribute | css=select[name=elephants]@multiple | true

Hopefully this addresses some of the eventual ‘why the heck did my script break!?!?!’ problems that will no double crop up once Selenium IDE 1.0.10 gets wider distribution.

A Smattering of Selenium #35

(If I wasn’t still recovering from a cold there would be something witty here.)

• We’ll start this week with a cartoon
• So I know I have linked to playing pacman with se 2, but here is a site that explains the ghost behavior. If Google implemented the algorithms properly-ish, then this should be the ticket to crazy high scores. There should be a contest for this…
• Cucumber + Cuke4Duke + Selenium (WebDriver) = Enlightenment is step-by-step instructions for using maven to wire all these things together.
• shell in a box means you can now use Se to automate a unix shell
• How test automation with Selenium or Watir can fail provides two code smells for automation
• UI test smells: if() and for() and files is a bit of a rebuttal with some additional commentary
• Surviving end-to-end-testing… or, using Selenium for fun and profit is a write-up of the XP Day session of the same name
• The first thing that really became obvious to is that the community has to stop thinking about the tools and step back to look at a wider picture of the processes that have evolved over the last decade. Tools are there to assist us with a process, so focusing on tools and not on the process is just causing problems in adoption for new teams. is from Gojko’s article in the December 2010 issue of The Tester. And is extremely important to remember given that this is a tool focused blog
• Missed Øredev? Watch the videos!
• A post from Sauce Labs shows how to put messages in your script runs. Crazy enough, I did something similar.

Selenium Conference Survey

Great news! Thanks to the initiative of our friends at Sauce Labs, we’re finally ready to host the first-ever Selenium Conference. We’re still working out a lot of the details, but so far we’ve decided this first conference will be sometime in April and hosted in San Francisco.

In order to figure out the rest of the details, we’re looking for feedback from the Selenium user community. Please take a moment to fill out the following survey. Your answers will help us properly plan the best possible conference.

http://bit.ly/fn8YyS

Thanks!

A Smattering of Selenium #34

We’ll start this week with the official announcement of ‘Selenium 1.0 Testing Tools: Beginner’s Guide’ being available. Congrats David! (Still waiting for my copy…)

• There is now a DZone ‘refcard’ for Selenium 2. Of course, the reason Se2 is alpha is the API isn’t done with at least one major addition still left so it will be out of date in a month, but still…
• Here is another example of how to do Page Objects in Python
• Client-Side Profiling with Selenium 2 is David’s post about his recent London Selenium User Group talk
• Someone took the time to make a Selenium lens on Squidoo; which is going to get kinda circular once this post shows up on it.
• Why Automated Testing is Broken. Not much of a commentary here other than A-freaking-men. Ok, that was commentary.
• Selenium Toolkit for .NET got a version bump for the first time in a year.
• Driving a Flex Application via Selenium 2 WebDriver shows how to use FlexSelenium and Web Driver together
• RVM is one of the ‘cool kid’ tricks and Continuous Integration with Hudson is one of those things you need to know how to do if you are using it.
• Vagrant appears to take RVM one (or more) steps further
• I keep thinking someone needs to create a Selenium koans site. Inspired by javascript koans and ruby koans
• Launchlist appeals to me somehow. Throw in an API for launching scripts and you have a nice TCM system
• I spent some time figuring out how to integrate Robot Framework with Sauce Labs OnDemand and then wrote about it
• Web Driver for the BlackBerry – did not know that even existed.
• gocept.selenium is another Zope 2/Plone/ZTK integration
• BDD, ATDD and Page Objects was a talk done at SkillsMatter which was recorded

Oh. and I just noticed that this is the Selenium-iversay edition of these things.

A Smattering of Selenium #33

…and here’s the links!

• Henrik Skupin was one of the speakers at the London Selenium Meetup and has written about the night and his talk
• Speaking of which, videos of the talks are now up
• Part of good automation is knowing how to code. So here are some sites that crossed my path this week for that
  • Rails for Zombies
  • Dive into HTML 5
  • HTML5 Rocks
• Cheezy continues his UI series which takes a detour over to WATIR land, but things are transferable. Introducing a Simple DSL and Default Data
• Functional Automation is an important part of Continuous Delivery. Here is Jez talking about Continuous Delivery — beer in hand. (which to me is the most important concept of the year)
• Acceptance Test-Driven Development with Robot Framework is an excerpt from Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development.
• BidiChecker is a tool for checking bidirectional (BiDi) text. So who is going to integrate this into Se?
• Interaction with Flash using FlashSelenium and Javascript – Part 1 starts to show how to use FlashSelenium to interact with Flash-y things.
• Looking for a Selenium job? Have a look at How to get a Rails job. When I have hired, or help people hire, this is very true.
• And finally the whole should-testers-need-to-know-how-to-code conflict bubbled up again somewhat last week. Since this is my list of links: if you are automating, yes; if you are not, then no (but it can’t hurt).
  • Don’t call me Technical
  • The Future of Testing
  • The Future of Testing is Wide Open

A Smattering of Selenium #32

For those people paying attention to the goings-on in the Selenium world, yes, I am skipping something major until some of the details are worked out and announced. Until then, here are the links I accrued over the week.

• Selenium uses Bamboo for its CI infrastructure. This week saw an upgrade to the latest version so if you want bleeding-edge code, get it here
• The only browser Se has no real traction on right now is the BlackBerry one. But if someone wanted to tackle it, here is a post from Atomic Object on their BlackBerry development environment that would help kickstart things maybe.
• Under the category of ‘let the language deal with things’ is html5lib for python and php which will parse html. Sometimes it is far faster to dump your attribute checks etc. to a native parser than let Se do it.
• Scott Sims has released Selenium Fury upon the Ruby world. Think of it as a Page Factory implementation for Ruby.
• Using Se-IDE and Easyb? Here is a thread on how to use the generated code without modification
• JRuby is one of the better languages to use to write Se scripts in, and here are videos from JRubyConf 2010
• Cheezy is writing a series on UI tests. So far there is How do we keep them from being brittle? and Part Two
• Se2 for JS? Sure, why not. webdriver-js
• Jari release the selenium-webdriver 0.1.0 gem this week. Why the big jump from 0.0.29 to 0.1.0? We’ve merged in the selenium-client gem into the main selenium codebase and now there is a single gem if you want to do 1.x or 2.x scripting.
• Google Refine is just darn cool. I’m not really sure how it plays into automation, but I get the sneaky suspicion it could. Somehow.
• The YUI Test has Se built right in.

A Smattering of Selenium #31

The big news for last week was that I released Se-IDE 1.0.8 to very little fanfare. 1.0.9 should be a week or two and much more important a release.

• Cheesecake! is isn’t nearly as impractical as Pacman, but still adds to the Se2 example bucket.
• The London Se Meetup stuff from last week are starting to appear…
  • Client-side profiling with Se2
  • a summary
  • How Mozilla uses Se
  • Crowd-sourced Automated Firefox UI Testing
• Some notes from CITCON last week as well. Seems like London was the place to be.
• When designing automation frameworks (internal or external), the list of ways to make it hard to misuse should be kept in the back of your mind.
• Of course your automation is under version control, right? RIGHT?!? What the Commit is rather amusing, if not a scathing satire. (hint: hit refresh)
• Sauce Labs announced the availability of a CI API. But there is nothing to say that you couldn’t integrate their alternative annotation methods outside of CI too.
• Harry Robinson did a session at CAST 2010 on ‘Exploratory Test Automation’ (which I missed; no, not bitter at all..) and I found his slides
• If you are using the hosted Bamboo solution and most of your Se tests need windows, then here are instructions on how to create your own custom elastic agent image
• Here is something fun, do you Hate or Love Se?
• Slate seems like an interesting module for Python folks since it can parse and extract information from PDFs which is often a black hole in automation.
• I continue to maintain that automation is programming (much to the annoyance of the classical black-box tester who is starting out with it) and that perhaps the easiest language to start learning is Python. Learn Python The Hard Way is a new book which looks like an ideal way to learn the language. I haven’t really gone through it to see which parts are more (or less) relevant to automation, but…
• You’re cuking it wrong has lots of tips on how to write Cucumber scripts well.

A Smattering of Selenium #30

I’ve missed a couple weeks due to travel and a complete system lock which meant I lost all the links I had open but not saved. So these are the ones I have recovered.

• I have written a series of posts on how to do parallel execution of tests in JUnit 4 up on the Sauce Labs blog. Part One, Part 2 and Part Three
• Quick start with FitNesse and Selenium is a beginners guide to wiring Selenium and FitNesse together. Though it might have been easier to just use Selenesse
• Meetup: Test Automation Tips, Techniques and Best Practice – Ruby and Java night in NYC, November 8
• Commit 10000 for the Se project. That’s a non-small number
• If you are using Maven 3, you can now use the Selenium Plugin with it now.
• Do Testers Have to Write Code? applies to Se as well.
• Multiple Sessions in Cucumber & Selenium got a fair bit of twitter love and is something I’m seeing clients want/need more and more
• A Set of Principles for Automated Testing is not a bad list. I completely disagree with the second one, and the last one is blatant employer promotion (but is contextually correct).
• RSpec best practices is a similar list which I have less complaint about. The third point is likely the most important one.
• Multiple Sessions in Cucumber & Selenium is a solution for when you are testing something with WebSockets with Cucumber.
• NUnit 2.5.8 is out.
• Dale Emery has released Runtime Suite which is super handy for creating test suites at runtime with JUnit 4. It doesn’t (yet) work with parameterized classes, but is still pretty cool
• Feed4JUnit seems to have don’t some of the legwork for people to do parameterized JUnit scripts. (Yes, I’ve been stuck in Java-land for the last while; why do you ask?)
• As Flex Pilot gets more usage, things are starting to trickle out into the blogs. Automating MyAppInFlex.swf – Useful FlexPilot commands is one of those posts.

Oh, and both 2.0a6 and 2.0a7 have been released. We’re getting closer to the ‘API freeze’ which will mark the end of ‘alpha’ and the start of bug fixing (beta) for the final release.

Selenium 2.0a6 Released

We are extremely pleased to announce the release of Selenium 2.0a6! Head over to the downloads page to get it while it’s hot, or wait just a little bit longer for it to appear in a maven repo near you. The .Net version will also be updated soon too, and the python and ruby libraries have been having smaller, more frequent releases all this time.

You’ll be pleased to hear that the Selenium 1.0 APIs have remained constant, so what’s changed? Here, in no particular order are the major changes you’ll find in 2.0a6:

• Android support: you can now download the APK and run webdriver tests using Android 1.6 to 2.2.
• Firefox 4 support.
• Experimental IE9 support
• New APIs for dealing with HTML5 elements (best implemented, for now, by the mobile webdrivers)
• A richer .Net API
• A move to Sizzle for locating elements using CSS in browsers that don’t have a native API for that.
• Far better support for running your existing Selenium RC tests using WebDriver, helping you make a managed migration to the newer APIs.

There are also lots of nice touches for the more technically inclined, including the ability to re-use instances of FirefoxProfiles, better configurability when requesting a remote webdriver instance, better resource management and more shared code between the Selenium and WebDriver implementations.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to report a bug on our issue tracker, or raised problems on one of our mailing lists, or shown up for some of the banter on the IRC channel: without your involvement, the project wouldn’t be half as much fun, and wouldn’t be as capable as it is. Thanks are also due to the development team, who have poured an enormous amount of work into this release (538 revisions in under 90 days, or about 6 check-ins each and every day)

Hope you like it!