Jolt Awards: The Best Testing Tools

Dr. Dobb's, May 01, 2012 The Annual Award for Best Testing Products
  • E-mail
  • Print
  • ShareShare

Jolt Award For Excellence in Testing Tools

Selenium

The first sentence on the Selenium website succinctly sums up what the product does: "Selenium automates the web browser. That's it." As a result, a huge ecosystem of extensions and plug-ins have been created to make Selenium the default web application testing tool found in nearly all serious web developers' toolboxes.

Selenium comes in two flavors. The Selenium IDE is a Firefox add-on that macro-records user interactions for playback and analysis. The generated scripts can be edited and replayed for further customization. The second is the more comprehensive Selenium WebDriver, a language-specific set of bindings to automate web browser interactions. The Selenium API supports C#, Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby, as well as specific testing frameworks such as Bromine, Hermes, JUnit, NUnit, RSpec, and Unnittest among others. Given the level of flexible automation that Selenium has to offer, scripting tests of Web-based apps is remarkably easy. Most developers and testers should be able to learn frequently used commands in a few hours.

Selenium can drive both desktop and mobile browsers. It even offers an Android server APK that makes on-device browser testing a snap. An iOS version is also available, but requires it a bit more work to compile into the the RemoteWebDriver class into your iOS project.

If you tried Selenium a few years ago and thought it was a bit rough around the edges or that it lacked a feature you needed, you should do yourself a favor and check out the latest release. Selenium is a mature product with excellent documentation and support, and it benefits from more than 20 plug-ins that can perform everything from page coverage reports to taking screenshots of failed states for further analysis. Users seeking commercial Selenium support have several options, principally from the project's creator and sponsor, Sauce Labs.

All of this technology is available at no cost due to being open source. It's a high-quality package at a price that can't be beat; and for that, it was awarded this year's Jolt Award for Excellence in Testing Tools.

— Mike Riley


INFO-LINK




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 

Best of the Web

First C Compiler Now on Github

The earliest known C compiler by the legendary Dennis Ritchie has been published on the repository.

Quick Read

HTML5 Mobile Development: Seven Good Ideas (and Three Bad Ones)

HTML5 Mobile Development: Seven Good Ideas (and Three Bad Ones)

Quick Read

Building Bare Metal ARM Systems with GNU

All you need to know to get up and running... and programming on ARM

Quick Read

Amazon's Vogels Challenges IT: Rethink App Dev

Amazon Web Services CTO says promised land of cloud computing requires a new generation of applications that follow different principles.

Quick Read

How to Select a PaaS Partner

Eventually, the vast majority of Web applications will run on a platform-as-a-service, or PaaS, vendor's infrastructure. To help sort out the options, we sent out a matrix with more than 70 decision points to a variety of PaaS providers.

Quick Read


More "Best of the Web" >>