Sunday, September 18, 2011

Selenium IDE vs Selenium RC

Starting the road trip to the world of automation testing, the choices of testing tools are limitless. One of the most popular and widely used tools for web application testing is the Selenium Suite.
Couple of the options the Selenium suite offers for testing, is the Selenium IDE and the Selenium Resource Control (RC). Both options have pros and cons and it is up to one needs to decide which one to use. 
One of the major disadvantages of the IDE is that only it works for Firefox, that is if you need to test for multiple browsers this is clearly not your choice.
A second major drawback of IDE is that the recorded scripts are easily maintainable for small scale projects but impossible to maintain in big ones. One of the major advantages of the IDE is that it is easily usable by non-technical personnel the simplicity of recording and replaying scenarios is an appealing choice for small scale projects. 
In this blog I will explore the Selenium RC ways for testing large scale web applications. I will present techniques for implementing test scripts and I   will pass my experience for avoiding common mistakes. The experiences I will share with you are real life ones gained in participating in various test teams.