[Owasp-o2-platform] Experience with SeleniumHQ on .Net

Sat Jan 16 19:36:37 EST 2010

Hi

We used Selenium quite a lot on a project I was working on. Our biggest 
problem with Selenium (and really any type of "test through the GUI" 
framework) was keeping the test stable. Tests quickly proved to be 
fragile, meaning they would break when we were changing stuff that
wasn't really realted. Fragile tests are a pain because they cost
more to maintain, than the value they provide in terms of lower bug rate.
An important aspect of tests are automation, and this was one of the 
problems we had. Even though we could get the selenium tests to run
somewhat stable, it was never stable enough for you to get any confidence 
in the tests. So in the end we ended up not trusting them.

Summarized
- The HTML changes to frequently, so keeping them up to date is 
pretty hard
- Testing through the browser is hard because you are testing a too big 
part of the stack (you are testing more than what you are in control of) 
and the tests will always be slow compared to proper unit tests.

Please note though that this doesn't mean I would never use Selenium. It 
does mean however that I would keep in mind that these tests are expensive 
to maintain and thus only use these kinds of tests for smoke tests or 
things I could not test in any other way. XSRF-protection might be an 
interesting thing to test using Selenium.

Erlend

On Sat, 16 Jan 2010, dinis cruz wrote:

> Hi, if anybody here as experience with using http://seleniumhq.org to write
> unit tests on .NET , can you share your thoughts and experiences?
>
> Dinis Cruz
>
> Blog: http://diniscruz.blogspot.com
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/DinisCruz
> Web: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/O2
>