Functional Testing with Selenium

In an Agile environment, Selenium can be used in order to test the programming logic written. Functional testing is important, as it allows us to verify the interface of the application is behaving as expected.

selenium is a tool for testing web applications from the Browser or via a FireFox plugin.

Record & Play:

The Selenium IDE allows you to record test scripts which can automate the testing of a web application interface. For example, I could record the actions of logging into an application and then then clicking through to some feature and perhaps entering and saving some data. I could then assert that the output from those actions meets my expectations, very similar to how unit testing frameworks work.

The great thing about all of this is that it removes most of the tedium in testing your application when you are developing and debugging. Most importantly, you have a set of repeatable and consistent tests that can be performed at the click of a button.

Better yet, Selenium also has a remote control server which lets you execute tests from API's covering Java, Ruby, PHP, .NET and Perl. The advantage of this approach is you write your functional tests in your preferred programming language and maybe execute them as part of a continuous integration process.