A Smattering of Selenium #36A

I have drastically fallen behind on the link reporting, but not the collecting, so this week’s Smattering will be multi-part.

I have drastically fallen behind on the link reporting, but not the collecting, so this week’s Smattering will be multi-part.

The ‘big’ news falls for this edition is two fold –

  1. We’re having a conference! Selenium Conference 2011 is April 4 – 6, 2011 in San Francisco. See the site for more information. (And I think our friends at Watir are going to be in the same space the day before.)
  2. The Betas are here! The Beta’s are here! As Simon’s post announced, Selenium 2.0b1 has been released to the [unsuspecting] masses. Everyone, including Se-RC users are encouraged to switch their server over to it — its backwards compatible with 1.x and has a tonne of important fixes (like the HEAD request on open, -htmlSuite works again, etc.)

And not to downplay things, but here are the usual assortment of things I think are of interest/value to those automating stuff [with Selenium].

  • Checklists are a Good Thing™ when it comes to testing, so why not automation too? So here is a Unit Test Review Checklist
  • ExtJS is one of those things that seems to come up more often than not on the se-users list which makes me think I’m lucky that none of my clients use it. Testing Extjs Application With Selenium : Few Pointers seems like it would be useful in such an event though.
  • Those of us around the automation space for awhile have often heard about Google’s mythic ‘Small, Medium, Large’ scheme for categorizing scripts — and now they are documented. Combining this idea with tagging of scripts and you’re laughing.
  • Looks like IBM is now starting to care about Selenium in developerWorks with Automated web testing with Selenium which has an assortment of quick things to help people out. And it is IBM so it got lots of love from folks [bots?] on Twitter.
  • Personas is something from the UX community that I’ve started to think more about in terms of what gets automated and/or how the the scripts are organized. The Persona Cheat Sheet will help you start down that road too.
  • Testing Experience magazine recently had an Open Source issue which had some interesting articles. Doesn’t appear to be anything groundbreaking, but my definition of that might be a bit warped.
  • Oooo! All of this year’s GTAC videos in one place. Now you really can pretend you were in India for the week.
  • Go faster! Linking data generation to hotkeys is one of those posts that could be quite useful if you use automation to move quickly around a site so you can manually test it.
  • Selenium IDE 1.0.10 is a ‘stable’ version (unlike 1.0.8 and 1.0.9 it seems) but did introduce one change to how element attributes are handled which I documented in Atoms have come to Selenium IDE
  • Using Python’s unittest module? Consider upgrading to unittest2

Only 46 more links to go through… 🙂