About Open Source

I have been using open source software since I started my first job around 10 years ago. By then the world was very different, Microsoft still dominated most of the software world (Windows, Visual Studio, .NET Framework, MS Office, SQL Server), and open source was still a small part of the whole ecosystem. Yet open source spread up like a virus over the last 10 years, and now even Microsoft is forced to embrace open source (well, it's also CEO related I guess).

To me, there are two major advantages using open sourced software:

  1. free of charge

  2. able to inspect, modify and recompile the sources.

Read more About Open Source

Painful Selenium Testing – Part 4 – Firefox Screenshot

One problem with selenium (using either IDE, RC or Webdriver) is that you don't know what actually happened during the execution.

The selenium result would give some hints, e.g. if the verifyTextPresent failed then you know there is a missing text during execution. But you would like to know what actually appears on that screen? Did the page show up an error page? Or just the value is changed, or probably the server died?

The nature of automated testing is that you are unlikely to watch the executions all the time. Otherwise it's pointless to do the automation.

Read more Painful Selenium Testing – Part 4 – Firefox Screenshot

Painful Selenium Testing – Part 3 – Automated HTML Suite with Firefox

As mentioned in previous post, we now use the following archtiture to do the testing:

Selenium IDE + Selenium Server

The exact command we used for the execution of testing suite is:

java -jar c:/jenkins/selenium-server-standalone-2.33.0.jar -userExtensions C:\jenkins\bin\user-extensions.js -port 4520 -timeout 900 -firefoxProfileTemplate c:\FirefoxPortable201\Data\profile -htmlSuite "*firefox C:\FirefoxPortable201\App\Firefox\firefox.exe" http://example.com test_cases\suit_405_testing_example.html result_suit_405_testing_example.html -singlewindow

Some highlights here:

  1. The suit_405_testing_example was assumed to be exported from Selenium IDE, it is a set of HTML actions that are recorded on Selenium IDE.

  2. We set up a custom user-extensions.js for screen capture of error page in Firefox, it was not supported by default. Here are some details of the script.

Read more Painful Selenium Testing – Part 3 – Automated HTML Suite with Firefox