It’s also worth noting that Selenium doesn’t limit you to just mouse clicks and entering in form data.

Focus: One can monitor important aspects of the system instead of wasting time entering in data.

Repetitive Stress Syndrome: One mouse click now replaces a significant amount of typing.

Version Controlled: Each test can be committed to a repository where changes can be tracked.

Shareable: Each test can be distributed to colleagues and clients.

Consistency: Every iteration is exactly the same, eliminating human error out of the equation.However, there are several other factors that we wish to highlight: Hopefully this effectively highlights the speed advantage of using Selenium. Testing permission differences by masquerading between several different user roles.Testing adding/updating/deleting users and content.Testing that ajax requests are returning the correct data.Testing that rules are firing off properly on certain events.Testing webform, contact, and form submissions.Testing the Drupal Commerce checkout process.Here are several examples where one could get started: This is where Selenium truly shines for newcomers because its the easiest way to get a quick and significant return on one’s investment of time. The goal at this level is to reduce the time it takes to create a quality product. The remainder of this article will expand on these three items.Īuthors Note: although the information below is highly specific to Drupal, the principles can be applied to many other web based technologies and communities. eliminate repetitive tasks during a build out phase). Selenium is useful at all stages of a websites lifecycle. Site builders, front end developers, trainers, content managers, etc can all find places where they can offload some of the more repetitive tasks into a series of Selenium tests that they can re-use over and over again. Selenium is not only useful for back end developers. Both methods are extremely useful and will be covered in this article. The firefox plugin allows one to record your actions and play them back directly in firefox, while the WebDriver approach requires one to write tests directly into code, which opens the door for integration with Drupal’s simpletest framework. Selenium comes in two flavors: Selenium IDE ( a firefox plugin) and Selenium WebDriver. In short, anything that a user can do in a web browser on a web page (click, select, toggle, submit, etc), Selenium can be programmed to repeat. The Selenium homepage says it best: Selenium automates browsers. In the case of web development, that means more time spent building bigger and better websites and less times slogging through a QA backlog. And like compound interest, reinvesting that back into further improvements will result in even larger returns. If we as a community start investing in testing tools like Selenium, we can start to reclaim time and mental RAM. And without proper testing tools and systems in place, it’s possible to enter a vicious cycle where changes introduce new bugs that become even harder to track down by hand. However, the reality is that there are many points along the Drupal development cycle where a significant amount of human resources can be spent detecting and/or fixing issues (examples: adding new features, upgrading modules, applying patches, exploring module functionality, etc). This particular example may seem a bit extreme. Instead, I had wasted most of my mental RAM on the monkey tasks. If only I had known about Selenium IDE at that time, I could have reclaimed most of that time and focused my attention on the one thing that truly mattered: testing my code. At least 80% of my time was being wasted clicking through each page (store -> product -> add to cart -> checkout -> review -> complete) and entering information fake billing, shipping, and credit card information (24 fields in total). I started having flashbacks of the plastic factory experience while my vision became blurred staring at my monitor after entering the 100th test order over a 10 hour period. On one of my first projects, I had to add some additional logic at the end of the customer checkout process on a Drupal 6 site using Ubercart. Overall the experience was mind numbingly tedious, and it inspired me to work hard through the rest of high school to ensure that I would never have to do that type of work again!įast forwarding many years later to the start of my career in Drupal web development… air bubbles, carbon black, mechanical indentations, etc).

I attribute this intense, emotional reaction to a job I had at age 16, where I worked at a plastic factory inspecting box after box of clear vials to look for the defects (e.g.

I detest monkey work and I’ll do anything I can to avoid it.

Drupal development tests