Ruby, Rails, Selenium and testing...

Steve Longdo — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 03:44:00 +0000

People that have worked with me in the past know how much I think unit tests are worth. In fact I won't say any more about them. White box testing has a place, it just isn't on my blog.

Selenium is an open source testing framework that will be making products like Mercury Interactive's WinRunner quake in their boots. Being able to do acceptance/functional/regression/Black Box testing of web applications across browser and OS platform boundaries from a single script file is already possible with Selenium. The major testing/QA vendors can't even boast that level of functionality yet. Even better AJAX applications are supported by Selenium. There is a Selenium IDE that works as an extension to Firefox. You can simply record your actions "macro-like" as you navigate through the web application you want to test.

What makes this all the more exciting is the recent selenium_on_rails plugin. It allows you to embed and run your Selenium tests as rake tasks. Automated quality assurance has never been this compelling to include as part of the development process.

So far the only short coming I've observed is the lack of i18n support, however the new .rsel format probably could be used to overcome this. Rsel lets you define your Selenium tests in terms of Ruby code. To see all of this in action take a look at the excellent screencast over at and then nothing.net.

UPDATE: Someone made a good point that I maybe didn't make clear here, Selenium can be used to test ANY web application, not just Rails powered, but even legacy Java, .NET, PHP, or any other caveman languages from the last century. :-)

Musings of a Trained Monkey: Tag selenium

Ruby, Rails, Selenium and testing...