March 16th, 2010 §
Having used the 1.0.3 version of Selenium RC for several weeks I now have an overall impression of the new release. The thing that bugged me most was that the upgrade was not as smooth as I hoped - several tests that previously worked fine with 1.0.1 started to fail with 1.0.3. We were able to relatively quickly find workarounds for what seem to be bugs introduced in the new release. Here are two links to the Selenium issue database in case you run into the same or similar problems - 400 and 408; look for 'XHR ERROR' exceptions in your logs when opening URLs.
With the workarounds our tests became as stable as before – not better and not worse. The new version did not really bring any noticeable improvements for me – I have not yet moved to Firefox 3.6 and I am not a Mac user. So my advise would be – If you have your tests running smoothly on 1.0.1 and you don't need Snow Leopard and/or FF 3.6 support yet, don't bother upgrading for now. There might be a new release on the horizon.
February 24th, 2010 §
Actually for the last two days there were two new releases of Selenium - 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 (released on the next day following 1.0.2 to fix some issues). The most important feature in the new release for me is Firefox 3.6 support. If you are a Mac fan you will be glad to know that OS X Snow Leopard is now supported too.
When it comes to tools I use for work I usually prefer to wait a little before upgrading, so that any potential problems that might be there are discovered by other people and not by me (the quick release of 1.0.3 seems to confirm that this is actually a good idea). On the other hand my previous experience with upgrading test automation tools shows that I sometimes run into problems no one else has found.
So this time I decided to upgrade to 1.0.3 early and I will blog about my experience.
By the way, there is also a new official Selenium blog.
October 31st, 2009 §
Right after the recent release of Windows 7 Microsoft also released a platform update for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. The update brings in some of the new technologies from Windows 7 to those operating systems. Besides 'Windows Graphics, Imaging, and XPS Library' (which actually gives you new DirectX), 'Windows Portable Devices Platform' and 'Windows Ribbon and Animation Manager Library' (I hate the ribbon interface), the update also includes something called 'Windows Automation API', which "enables accessibility tools and test automations to access the Windows user interface in a consistent way across operating system versions"
Since Active Accessibility Microsoft has been providing programmatic interfaces for UI automation in Windows. So if you are starting a Windows automation project, think about using this approach. You can script with the Automation API in any of Microsoft's programming languages (Visual Basic, C# and even C++) even with the free Express Editions of Visual Studio. This will not only be a really cost efficient approach, compared with the prices of automation tools like QTP or RFT, but probably will produce results which are more stable too. After all this is the technology Microsoft uses to create UI tests for their own applications.