Selenium - Thank You Open Source!

the_Grinch

We have a project at work to redo the online application for applying to the university. The project is way way way over budget and quite literally a year late. It honestly was FUBAR from the start, old CEO wanted it completely outsourced to one of two firms. New VP of IS didn't want to say no to anything so promises were made (I get it to a point, so I won't lay a 100% blame on him at least for the beginning), and basically no requirements given to the company who is writing it. A year later and its come to it getting released in April no matter what. Thus, even me the lowly keyboard plugger has been brought in to make sure it happens. Coming in 8 months late as aside from submitting a few dozen apps looking for bugs, I wasn't a part of the team, has been brutal at best. They hired a "contractor" (long story behind how a very unqualified person was brought in to do testing and submit bug fixes) and now he is gone so it falls to myself along with my boss.

The VP purchases a tool to do automated testing, fill out all the forms and answer the questions in one click. Now we only got two hours of training included with the tool and the "contractor" was the one who received the training a long with one member of our team. Thus we have to get up to speed with this tool and it is not going well. It is a pain to do anything and it's been troubling to get running. When I left yesterday I vowed to find another way to do it. I figured maybe I could use Python to make my own solution (or at least piece together varies scripts to do it), but after two hours it wasn't looking good (I was doing this at home on my own time). In my various searches, I stumbled upon Selenium. At first I thought nah can't use it, not going to setup a sever to do this testing (albeit I didn't know all the features found in the server). But looking through the site I found Selenium IDE, a plugin for Firefox.

Holy cow is it awesome! Within 15 minutes I had already "scripted" the registration process successfully. The tool we purchased couldn't handle the long url (encryption on parts of the information passed through) so we had to use another site to shorten the URL. No issue with Selenium IDE. In literally about a minute it went through the entire process and allows me to change the info to register a different account. In our other tool, it was a pain and a half to change it after. I've read (only a little) that with the server version I'll be able to run multiple browsers on different machines to apply (though it would require some coding). I have a meeting today about testing and I'm thinking about bringing up Selenium, though my one team member says it's futile because I'll be told to use the tool we purchased.

Any thoughts if I should bring it up?

MrAgent

If its going to make your job easier, and can help the project, I sure would bring it up.

UnixGuy

I don't know anything about this tool, but show it to the VP of IS, why not?

the_Grinch

Thanks guys! I let the VP know I wasn't found of the program, offered the alternative, and he told me to run with it for a few days to see where I got. Also told me a job well done in finding an alternative