November 2011 Monthly Meeting Summary
Topic:
Experience with Selenium 2 Web Driver - presentation by Austin Chamberlin (Ettain Group), Gopal Addada (Cigital Inc.), and Nil Weerasingh (FINRA)
In 2009, the original Selenium community merged with Google’s Web Driver and was renamed 'Selenium 2 Web Driver', with significant
changes and new features such as automation via browser APIs, ability to test on mobile platforms, not requiring Selenium
server, etc. This presentation will share experiences and also demonstrate some custom-developed features
Presenter Bios:
Austin Chamberlin is a contractor for Ettain Group and is interested in all aspects of the "cloud computing" paradigm,
from back end infrastructure to user experience.
Gopal Addada is a consultant at Cigital Inc. Areas of expertise include functional and load test automation
and network security. Gopal has extensive experience in developing custom test tools using Java.
Nil Weerasinghe works at FINRA (formerly NASD) as a senior delivery lead. His areas of interest
include software architecture, software development, software security and software QA in mobile computing,
cloud computing and web based applications.
Took place on: Wed. November 9 2011 6:30 PM
Attendance: 23
Meeting Notes:
- Selenium 2 was a merger of Selenium and Webdriver; Webdriver was developed by Google. Selenium-WebDriver makes direct calls to the browser
using each browser’s native support for automation, whereas the original Selenium used javascript injection to drive browser interactions.
Thus far there have been regular updates to the webdriver drivers to keep up with the various browser versions.
- As mentioned in the presentation, the improvements included HTML Unit Support, IE 9 Support, IOS/Android support, better popup and dialogs handling,
no Selenium RC required, cleaner multiple window interaction, and more.
- It was noted that the Xpath engine in IE7 is very slow, so webdriver can inject javascript to speed things up, although the idea had been to
incorporate webdriver to get away from Selenium's use of javascript injection. It was also noted that IE9 seems to have cleaned up many of the problems of IE7.
- The presenters used TestNG for help with test execution/management among other things
- They developed a DataGenerator app to read Visio annotations (with Visio diagrams and annotations serving as specifications for Web functionality)
and this was integrated with Apache Velocity to then automatically generate tests. Thus tests could automatically be generated to cover all web
functionality paths with each change in the Visio-based specs.
- A PDF presentation from the meeting is available
novataig_2011_11_Experience_with_Selenium_2_Web_Driver.pdf (2 MB file size).
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