I’ve had Selenium on my radar for a while. Automating web app tests in a browser? Sounds great. FIT-style test definitions? Fantastic. Run it from JUnit? Wow! But I was always “too busy” and never got anywhere with it until I discovered Selenium IDE, a Firefox extension that can create and run Selenium tests. I watched this screencast, installed Selenium IDE, and was up and running in no time. I highly recommend it.

It immediately proved useful, as I discovered an intermittent bug in one of our web apps. Selenium IDE recorded my session on the web app, including a check for certain text that indicated the bug. I saved the test definition as an HTML file and attached it to the bug report. After I walked the developer through installing Selenium IDE and loading my test, she could run through it several times to finally trigger the bug. Bingo! I don’t think I’ll need more than that to sell the tool to the rest of my team.

Now I need to dig deeper and see what more Selenium can do for me. Also, take a look at Selenium on Rails.