From IDE to Selenium 2

Here are the slides from my ‘From IDE to Selenium 2′ talk that I gave at the second London Selenium Users meetup. Slides from the other talks to follow.

Full project containing Selenium IDE test script, Selenium 2 Java TestNG tests (including dependancies), and slides available in this public Subversion repository.

Another successful Selenium meetup in London!

Last night was the second London Selenium Users meetup. In contrast to the last one – a purely social event in a pub in Fitzrovia – this one was hosted by Google with talks from myself, David Burns (The Automated Tester), Eran Messeri (Google), and a Q&A with Simon Stewart (Google).

I arrived at Google’s London HQ (or Googleplex) at 18:00 to meet with Eran and Simon – who was only around thanks to the cloud of volcanic ash preventing him from flying out to New York! After a quick tour of the offices, and a brief label-off (I lost) people started to arrive. They were early – definitely a good sign!

I was the first to present, and I’m not used to speaking in-front of an audience, but my preparation and practise paid off as I feel my presentation went well. My talk covered a suggested migration path from Selenium IDE to Selenium 2 using my WebDriver Backed Formatters plugin for IDE, and contained live demos. After a few questions my presentation was over and I could relax!

David Burns next took to the stage with his presentation on what Selenium 2 means to the average QA. There was a short delay in getting started (which I understand we’re blaming Eran for, but might be more to do with David not using a Macbook ). Before long David’s talk was under way. Of particular interest were the demos, where by simply switching a test to use Selenium 2 he solved one of the most irritating limitations of Selenium 1 – typing into a rich text editor! This was followed by solving another limitation, with a demo that entered a file name into a <input type=”file”> field. After a few more questions for both David and Simon, the second presentation came to an end.

After our final break Eran gave a short presentation of his current work on an advanced user interactions API, which is something I’m looking forward to for testing complex Ajax applications with rich interfaces. The idea being that you can combine several actions such as ‘Hold shift, click down on element X, and drag it onto element Y’. Also mentioned was the mobile (or ‘Fingers’) interactions API to support swiping, pinching, etc. A very good talk, and proof (if needed) that Google are taking the future of Selenium very seriously – there’s a lot of work going into it!

Earlier on in the evening Simon had asked for questions to be written on the whiteboard, and instead of his planned talk – which he’d mostly given all of the details out as answers to questions throughout the evening – he worked his way through the list. The questions included: testing Ajax applications using Selenium 2 (you can), is the Selenium IDE dead (no), is Selenese dead (not quite), and does Selenium Grid support Selenium 2 (not yet).

After the Q&A it there was just time for some more refreshments, but then I had to then start my journey home. I hear those that stayed had some lively discussions in the nearby pub about dynamic Firefox instances and the like, with Google buying everyone one more beer!

Feedback on the event has so far been very positive, and I’d like to thank everyone that came along – there were some interesting questions, and a good range of Selenium experience in the room.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable event and I’d like to thank Google for being such awesome hosts, Simon for all of his efforts and question answering, Eran Messeri for his great work on the project and for sharing some of that with us, and David Burns for his presentation and demos.

I would also like to thank Jérémy Hérault (Selenium committer) and Kévin Pollet (creator of Helium plugin for Selenium IDE) for coming along – they were travelling for 8 hours to get to the event and had to do a return journey the same day! I hope it hasn’t put you off coming to future events guys!

Slides, notes, demos, videos (possibly), all to follow!

New London Users Event: Introducing Selenium 2

Today the ‘Introducing Selenium 2′ London Selenium Users event was tentatively announced for April 20th 2010. Please visit the event page to register your interest. The date will be confirmed when a venue has been decided. If you would like to suggest a venue, please send me a message.

A Successful First London Selenium Meetup

The first London Selenium meetup took place on the 11th November. If you weren’t able to make it then due to the success I will be scheduling another one early in the new year.

From the feedback I’ve received it seems people would like some sort of presentation or demo at the next event. If you would like to volunteer to talk at the next event please get in touch via the Meetup.com group page. Please also get in touch if you have suggestions for a venue, or suggestions for topics that you’d like to hear about.

Some suggested topics are below. Soon I will combine these with any other suggestions into a poll to see what is most popular. You can make further suggestions by responding to this message.

1. Stop pausing – testing AJAX with Selenium by waiting instead of pausing
2. Minimising impact of UI changes using the UI-Elements map
3. Introduction to locating elements by XPath and CSS
4. Integrating Selenium tests into a continuous build
5. Battle of the testing frameworks – what’s available and how to choose
6. Selenium in the Grid – How to get Selenium Grid working, and how to test in the Cloud
7. Selenium vs QTP – What are the main differences? The pros and cons of each
8. Selenium 2.0 examples – Demonstration of what’s available in WebDriver/Selenium 2.0
9. Introducing Selenium to an organization. Challenges, steps, selling Selenium to management
10. Testing best practices
11. How to balance effort required to create tests with benefits

You can see a few photos of the first meetup here. I have also set up a poll asking Should we have name labels for future events?

Finally, I’d like to once again thank the sponsors Paul Humphreys from Clear Cube Consulting & Phil Smith from Cloud Testing for their support by providing venue and refreshments costs for the first event. I hope they benefited from the event as much as everyone else!

London Selenium Meetup increases RSVP limit

Due to the impressive response to the first London Selenium Meetup event, I am pleased to announce that I have increased the RSVP limit from 30 to 40. Head over to the Meetup or Event page to join and RSVP. If the 40 places are already full then add yourself to the waiting list and you’ll be notified if anybody drops out.