Selenium IDE: I’m in love (sorry Linda).

For quite sometime now I’ve been trying to find something out there that would let me record my actions on a web page and then save them as a script. The idea was so that I while I was programming and debugging, I didn’t to remember or perform the recreation steps. Another reason I wanted something like this was so that I could easily just take the script and attach it to the bug. Now I don’t have to write out the recreation steps.

I know there are a lot of programs out there that can do stuff like this, but I never found one that I personally liked. Either the programs were too complex, expensive, platform specific or down right unusable. I actually was hoping that someday someone would write something for FF. My prayers have been answered.

Selenium IDE is about as simple as you can get and meets every requirement I could dream of. It’s a FF extension so it will works on both Windows and Mac; even Linux!, It’s a 2 second install, extremely easy to use and best of all FREE!

Here is a quick walk through:

To open Selenium IDE (SIDE) just choose TOOLS -> SELENIUM IDE. The interface is very simple and clean. The Base URL lets you choose which site to run the script on. This is great because you can create a script on your test site (www.example.test) and still run the script on your live site (www.example.com).

The second you open SIDE it’s ready to record your action. As you click through you site and fill in form fields, your steps show up in the center window under the TABLE tab.

By changing to the SOURCE tab you can view the source code that makes up the task and modify it if you want.

You also have the option of changing the source to different programming languages. As you can see they give you the option of writing tasks in PHP, C#, JAVA and other languages. Though I haven’t done it, it wouldn’t be too much to write some code that would pull username and password from a database to pre-populate a login form. This way you could test out different roles and users.

This just shows you a basic task whose source has been converted over to C# by choose C# from the format menu.

Once you’ve recorded your tasks, you can save the task as a file. This is great. Now you can email the task to your buddy and he can play back the task and see exactly what problems you discovered in your web application. Excellent stuff indeed.

Although the purpose of SIDE is for QAing applications, I can see people using it for other things as well. Imagine recording a task for your family member that shows them how to use a particular website. Maybe even to record repetitive tasks that you have to do on a company intranet site. Who knows?

The only thing that this product is missing is a scheduler. It would be nice to be able to schedule a task to run at a certain time or increment. This could be very useful to some people.

All and all this product is great. I can say anything bad about it whatsoever. It’s very easy to use and will probably take you a minutes of playing with to get the hang of it. Have fun.