Selenium is a widely-used and very useful tool for automated web testing. This article is a very short primer designed to get you up and running Selenium Tests in Groovy in your Maven projects.

Selenium is a popular web testing framework, well known for the Selenium IDE, which lets you record and replay web tests in the form of HTML files. However, that is not my preferred way of using Selenium. In fact, I much prefer using tools like Selenium for Acceptance Test-Driven Development. The high-level Selenium API is great for writing executable acceptance tests. This approach also works well with easyb, but in this article, for simplicity's sake, we'll just be sticking to plain old JUnit-driven acceptance tests.

People often confuse performance and scalability testing, but they are actually quite different activities. Performance testing involves ensuring that your application responds to requests within an acceptable timeframe. Of course, defining what "acceptable" is is a fine art, and perceived performance (what the user actually sees) is often more important than real performance.

In the world of automated web testing, Selenium 2/WebDriver is the new kid on the block, but it is also arguably the most compelling web testing tool around at the moment. Selenium 2/WebDriver is the result of the merging of two popular open source web testing frameworks: Selenium 1 and WebDriver, in an effort to learn the lessons gleaned from both of these older libraries. And the teams have learned their lessons well, and come up with a slick, elegant and functional testing framework.

Come get up to speed on the latest techniques in Test-Driven Development, Behaviour-Driven Development and Automated Acceptance Testing!

The Wakaleo TDD/BDD workshop schedule for the next six months is out!

In response to popular demand, the TDD/BDD workshops have been extended to a 3-day format, and include more time for numerous labs, group programming exercises, and live coding demonstrations.

You will learn about vital modern development best practices such as Test-Driven Development, Behaviour-Driven Development, and Automated Acceptance Tests, and how to apply them in your own projects. You will gain practical experience with the latest in open source testing tools, including JUnit 4.8, Mockito, automated web testing using Page Objects with Selenium 2/Web Driver, and JOLT-Award winner easyb.

You will also learn about the relationship between Automated Acceptance Tests (ATDD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD). You will also learn how to refactor code to make it easier to maintain and to test, and how to use code coverage and code quality tools such as Cobertura to isolate poor quality or poorly-tested code.

A general outline of the course program is shown here:

• A Gentle Introduction to Test-driven Development and Behaviour-Driven Development
• Getting started with TDD
• JUnit Kung Fu - Fixtures, Hamcrest asserts, Exception testing, Timeouts, Parameterized tests, Rule annotations, writing your own Hamcrest matchers...
• Continuous Testing in Eclipse with Infinitest
• Using Mocks and Stubs for state-based and interaction-based testing with Mockito
• Refactoring best practices
• Using test coverage metrics to improve your testing process
• Testing Spring applications
• Testing Servlet and Portlet-based applications
• Testing a web interface with Selenium 2.0/WebDriver
• Test-Driving Legacy Code
• Writing more expressive unit tests in Groovy
• Automating your Acceptance Tests - Acceptance Test Driven Development
• Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) and Acceptance-Test Driven Development (ATDD) with easyb

Over the first 4 months of 2011, we currently have public sessions planned for Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington, Canberra and Brisbane. And of course we can also run tailored versions of the course onsite.

These workshops are becoming increasingly popular, so it's worthwhile booking ahead. So what are you waiting for? Sign up now!