I discovered a very neat tool the other day – it goes by the name of Selenium.  Now, up till this point, my knowledge of Selenium was limited in knowing that it’s an element apparently contained in some shampoos (its amazing where we pick this stuff up from)…

But this name is shared with an open source testing suite for the web.  And, it’s pretty amazing – if you are testing a web project/interface/site, you need to at least take look at Selenium.  It sure beats paying trained monkeys to do your quality assurance testing (especially with the price of bananas these days – these are much better used for smoothies).  You can record a set of instructions and simply ‘play’ these back to the browser at the desired speed.  These instructions are recorded directly into an HTML file, then played back in a web browser - using a frame-based control panel (see demo).

One of the great things about this software (apart from the fact that it’s open source – did I mention that!?) is that it allows for testing of more complicated products – such as ComponentArt drop down menus.  I was given this tip from a post in their forum.  While it takes some mucking around to get it working with such controls (you need to manually determine table ID’s of the elements and manually enter mouseOver events, etc), you can even use it to test ComponentArt drop down menus.  Great stuff… It’s so nice to record a test case and sit back, watching the computer do your (and the monkey’s) work for you…

As we learn more about this powerful testing application, this should allow us to take our testing to a new level – meaning even more powerful and reliable software for everyone…