Selenium IDE is back!

Selenium WebDriver creator, Simon Mavi Stewart (go tweet the legend here: @shs96c) has recently announced that the infamous Selenium IDE is making a return! He will be unveiling the new Selenium IDE November 14th via a webinar and you can attend by following: https://t.co/ivvfnEjC64

The Selenium IDE holds a dear place in my heart as I remember using it when I initially started to branch out into automation a few years back. I spent a good amount of time learning it and it really did play a big part in my development as a Tester. I wasn't very clued up in relation to automation (still learning) at that time and Selenium IDE was introduced to me by the lead Developer at the company I was working for. Looking back, I think he chose to introduce me to Selenium IDE because the learning curve wasn't as steep as it would have been had he introduced me to writing test scripts using Selenium WebDriver.

When it was then announced that Selenium IDE had been 'discontinued' my world fell apart for a few hours as this was my go-to for automation. With that said though, I'm thankful for this because it forced me to start learning how to automate tests using tools like STS and Pycharm utilising the Selenium WebDriver libraries.

I'm happy to see that it is making a come back and I do really feel it will help those that want to get into automation as well as add to the existing arsenal of tools we use as Testers. It will be interesting to see the different ways we can use this tool, which will be covered in the webinar above.

So, if you've never heard of Selenium IDE you might be asking yourself what it is.

Selenium IDE is a testing-framework which allows you to record, edit and playback tests on web applications automatically via a browser extension. For example, if you wanted to verify the functionality of a contact form or a registration form, this can be quite a tedious task when done manually. With Selenium IDE, you'd have this installed as a browser extension, open it, click record and fill out the form and submit. You'd then set the test pass criteria i.e, you tell the tool what to check to verify the test has passed. You can then play this test back over for the next time you need to verify the form submission.

I first used this on a healthcare application which required various information about a patient and their condition on separate tabs. So you'd have personal details on one tab, and all mandatory fields had to be complete before moving on to the next tab. There were about six tabs to go through before the user could sign up, so you could imagine how jarring it was to test different scenarios when adding profiles into the application! Oh the nostalgia. I can still hear the huffing and puffing now...

As mentioned above, there's a webinar on the 14th November and Simon will cover the purpose of using it and much more so go sign up!

Thank you for reading guys!

@webtesthub