Transition from a Rapid Prototyping to Programmatic Test Framework

摘要

The office of the Oregon Secretary of State was getting an increasing number of help desk calls related to running our applications in different browsers and mobile platforms. Automated testing had been implemented in 2007 using Selenium IDE (a rapid-prototyping test framework) with great success as reported in a 2009 PNSQC paper. Unfortunately, the IDE version of Selenium is a Firefox plug in and consequently only tested our Web applications using Firefox. We needed a way to run our automated test scripts in multiple browsers and on the most popular mobile platforms. Selenium WebDriver, the follow on product to Selenium RC has this capability, but requires more technical programming skills to build and maintain scripts. This paper describes our transition from a rapid-prototyping test framework, Selenium IDE, to a programmatic test framework, Selenium WebDriver. Specifically, it will compare the strengths and weaknesses of both tools in terms of: 1. Capabilities and adaptability 2. Time investment, metrics for script development 3. Script maintenance 4. Technical abilities required to become proficient 5. Scalability 6. Load testing The paper will discuss our evolved strategy for conversion of a large inventory of IDE regression test scripts and when and where we have decided not to convert.