Apr 9, 2007 / Acceptance and Regression Testing With Selenium: Intro

0 comments

Quality Assurance is a very important part of any project (I think nobody will argue, maybe only some self-assured developers who “always write bug-free code”). In many companies testing is no-fun activity, since tests automation is out of there. Typical tedious process looks like that:

1. QA persons read huge specification (or very small and brief spec which is even worth in such cases)
2. Then they create test plan and set of test cases. This is the most interesting part of testers work
3. Then developers push Release Candidate build into QA team and QA engineers execute all test cases manually
4. After weeks of testing they create report that shows actual product quality

I should say that manual testing is the most boring part of QA work (unless it is an Exploratory Testing). Click here, check system message, fill that fields, click Save, verify results. It’s a very, very boring stuff. The worst thing is that in some cases the same test case should be re-run several times. Do the same things again and again? No one in IT industry likes that, we have computers to handle such things after all! So why manual testing widespread? There are several reasons:

• Not perfect tooling support (especially for web development)
• Usually (this tendency is changing) testers have a little or no programming experience to create automated tests
• Managers in many companies think that effort required to create automated tests is “huge”, “too expensive”, “not worth the results”

Fortunately, during last several years something changed in the industry. First, agile development practices like TDD and Acceptance Testing adopted and became more popular. Second, simply genius tools appeared. In this article I will share our experience with Selenium — fantastic tool for acceptance testing in web-based projects.

Labels: acceptance testing, regression testing, selenium

posted by Michael Dubakov @ 6:23 AM