Part 1 : Application testing automation using Selenium IDE

This post is the first one of the series on using Selenium IDE for unit testing.

In a typical production OAM environment, we will have so many URLs which were protected by OAM. In some cases of prod breakdowns/changes, we will end up testing all the websites login with a test account and make sure the required page has been displayed after successful authentication and authorization.

Tools like Sitescope, CA wily etc are available in the market to verify the application availability periodically. However if you think of an Open source solution, I am not sure if we have any tools available for free which can be used to configure the applications and monitor them closely.

In this post, I would like to explore Selenium IDE tool and see if it fit my needs.

Selenium IDE is a Firefox plugin that does record-and-playback of interactions with the browser. Use this to either create simple scripts, assist in exploratory testing

Requirement: Let's say my environment has 100 websites, There is an unexpected outage and all servers were restarted. I would like to test all these 100 websites and make sure of the below

1. Site is up and running
2. Authentication and Authorization is successful
3. Expected page has been served by the App/web sever after successful Authentication and    Authorization

I would like to use Selenium IDE Tool to achieve this in lesser time and minimal manual effort.

Selenium IDE Plug-in Installation:

Selenium is from the house of Mozilla. it can downloaded from http://docs.seleniumhq.org/download/ This plug-in can be found in Mozilla Firefox add-ons too

You can either download the IDE from the website and install it or launch a Firefox browser and search for selenium add-ons and add them,

Once you install the plug-in, you can launch the IDE by navigating to Tools > Selenium IDE
or just click ctrl + alt + s

you will get a new window like this. Refer to Selenium documentation to get tips on how to use the tool. Plenty of videos on YouTube as well. :)

We will talk about  test case creation and automation in my next post.

Thanks,
Veeru Yads