Book Review: Selenium 1.0 Testing Tools - Part 1

In a first of its kind request, few months back someone requested me to do a book review – that too a book on “Selenium”. I wanted to learn Selenium since Long time, to compare and contrast traditional GUI based automation that I primarily worked on.

That is how I picked up this book by David Burns – a senior software engineer in test at Mozilla Corporation (Not Mozilla Foundation) I am not an expert in Selenium – this review of mine as from the eyes of a learner. I have attempted to convey how someone like me trying to learn Selenium would find this book. Those who are with Agile movement and likes might find my comments rather unusual – bear with me. I am from a different world …

Where do I start from? Before I started reading the book – I did some reading on the web. I was looking for a good definition for Selenium. Adam Goucher defined it as “Selenium is, at its core, a set of tools which let you control a browser. What you do with that control is completely up to you. Some frequent fliers use it to reserve aisle seats on their flights, but the majority use it as part of their testing process. After all, the end user of your product is not going to be experiencing the product through their browser as well, not via some wire-line unit testing framework.” I think, Adam’s definition is simply the best one to get started.

I would strongly recommend anyone starting with Selenium to read its history and especially support from Google.

As it happens with all most all books on “selenium” – even this book claims that Selenium tests the application and not selenium is a test automation framework. To me “testing” and “automation” are two different but complementary things and I think Selenium as an Automation tool rather than a “testing” framework.

Here is an account of my experience with the book – chapter by chapter.

- The book starts off with IDE installation and Selenium- “Hello World” kind of test (record-playback). The chapter covers few additional items to sample tests such as adding comments, debugging tests, working with multiple windows. AJAX applications make a sudden appearance in the chapter - not sure why. I feel the section on AJAX is not well connected with rest of the chapter. The section on “Saving Tests” is very brief – could have been expanded to cover exporting or converting IDE tests in other languages (Java) and automation frameworks. A brief introduction of TDD or ATDD or kind of automation that Selenium supports would have been a good way to start a book. Explanation of what is “Selenium” lacks depth and can confuse beginner and experience a like.

- The chapter on “locators” helps the reader to learn about locators. Coverage on DOM, XPath, CSS is pretty good. I would have liked the introduction be deeper. Finding the elements that make up a webpage is the work of these locators. You can locate elements by ID, name, DOM (through java script), XPath and CSS selectors. If you read the introduction of the chapter and summary – I am still confused about this question – “When we can get the page elements through record and playback function – why one needs to bother about locators – so many of them”. I think I know the answer. But I would have expected the explanation to be part of the chapter… “Why one needs to learn about Locators”. If you don’t ask this question – you can very easily follow the chapter and do hands on exercises without any problem and learn about IDE and some tricks

- As it is the case with other chapters so far – the introduction of chapter “Pattern Matching” lacked the depth and connection. It does not seem introduce the chapter by attempting to answer “Why pattern matching? Where? How this is applicable to automation in selenium”. The chapter, as in others mentions “In this chapter we shall do …..” I would have expected the book to cover – why part of these activities. I would have liked to see “how these activities fit in overall landscape”. Usage of pattern matching in general has been explained well. Use of “exact”, “glob” and other nuances of regular expressions, is covered in detail.

I will cover in next posts remain chapters of the book … Do Check back