Selenium Tutorial for Beginners Selenium is an open source technology for automating browser-based applications. Selenium is easy to get started with for simple functional testing of a Web application. I can usually take a beginner with some light testing experience and teach them Selenium in a 2 day course. A few years ago I wrote a fast and easy tutorial Building Selenium Tests For Web Applications tutorial for beginners.



The Selenium Tutorial for Beginners has the following chapters:

• Selenium Tutorial 1: Write Your First Functional Selenium Test
• Selenium Tutorial 2: Write Your First Functional Selenium Test of an Ajax application
• Selenium Tutorial 3: Choosing between Selenium 1 and Selenium 2
• Selenium Tutorial 4: Install and Configure Selenium RC, Grid
• Selenium Tutorial 5: Use Record/Playback Tools Instead of Writing Test Code
• Selenium Tutorial 6: Repurpose Selenium Tests To Be Load and Performance Tests
• Selenium Tutorial 7: Repurpose Selenium Tests To Be Production Service Monitors
• Selenium Tutorial 8: Analyze the Selenium Test Logged Results To Identify Functional Issues and Performance Bottlenecks
• Selenium Tutorial 9: Debugging Selenium Tests
• Selenium Tutorial 10: Testing Flex/Flash Applications Using Selenium
• Selenium Tutorial 11: Using Selenium In Agile Software Development Methodology
• Selenium Tutorial 12: Run Selenium tests from HP Quality Center, HP Test Director, Hudson, Jenkins, Bamboo
• Selenium Tutorial 13: Alternative To Selenium

A community of supporting open source projects - including my own PushToTest TestMaker - enables you to apply your Selenium tests as functional tests for smoke testing, regression testing, and integration tests, load and performance tests, and production service monitors. These techniques and tools make it easy to run Selenium tests from test management platforms, including HP Quality Center, HP Test Director, Zephyr, TestLink, QMetry, from automated Continuous Integration (CI) tests, including Hudson, Jenkins, Cruise Control, and Bamboo.

I wrote a Selenium tutorial for beginners to make it easy to get started and take advantage of the advanced topics. Download TestMaker Community to get the Selenium tutorial for beginners and immediately build and run your first Selenium tests. It is entirely open source and free!

SOA Testing with Open Source Test Tools PushToTest helps organizations with large scale Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications achieve high performance and functional service delivery. But, it does not happen at the end of SOA application development. Success with SOA at Best Buy requires an Agile approach to software development and testing, on-site coaching, test management, and great SOA oriented test tools.

Distributing the work of performance testing through an Agile epoc, story, and sprints reduces the testing effort overall and informs the organization's business managers on the service's performance. The biggest problem I see is keeping the testing transparent so that anyone - tester, developer, IT Ops, business manager, architect - follows a requirement down to the actual test results.

With the right tools, methodology, and coaching an organization gets the following:

• Process identification and re-engineering for Test Driven Development (TDD)
  
• Installation and configuration of a best-in-class SOA Test Orchestration Platform to enable rapid test development of re-usable test assets for functional testing, load and performance testing and production monitoring
• Integration with the organization's systems, including test management (for example, Rally and HP QC) and service asset management (for example, HP Systinet)
• Construction of the organization's end-to-end tests with a team of PushToTest Global Professional Services, using this system and training of the existing organization's testers, Subject Matter Experts, and Developers to build and operate tests
• On-going technical support

On-Site Coaching Leads To Certification
The key to high quality and reliable SOA service delivery is to practice an always-on management style. That requires on-site coaching. In a typical organization the coaches accomplish the following:

• Test architects and test developers work with the existing Testing Team members. They bring expert knowledge of the test tools. Most important is their knowledge of how to go from concept to test coding/scripting
  
• Technical coaching on test automation to ensure that team members follow defined management processes
  

Cumulatively this effort is referred to as "Certification". When the development team produces quality product as demonstrated by simple functional tests, then the partner QA teams take these projects and employ "best practice" test automation techniques. The resulting automated tests integrate with the requirements system (for example, Rally), the continuous integration system, and the governance systems (for example, HP Systinet.)
Agile, Test Management, and Roles in SOA
Agile software development process normally focuses first on functional testing - smoke tests, regression test, and integration tests. Agile applied to SOA service development deliverables support the overall vision and business model for the new software. At a minimum we should expect:

1. Product Owner defines User Stories
2. Test Developer defines Test Cases
3. Product team translates Test Cases into soapUI, TestMaker Designer, and Java project implementations
4. Test Developer wraps test cases into Test Scenarios and creates an easily accessible test record associated to the test management service
   
5. Any team member follows a User Story down into associated tests. From there they can view past results or execute tests again.
6. As tests execute the test management system creates "Test Execution Records" showing the test results
   

Learn how PushToTest improves your SOA software development life cycle. Click here to learn how.

18 Best Blogs On Software Testing 2011 began with some pretty basic questions for the software testing world:

• To what extent will large organizations dump legacy test tools for open source test tools?
• How big would the market for private cloud software platforms be?
• Does mankind have the tools to make a reliable success of the complicated world we built?
• How big of a market will SOA testing and development be?
• What are the best ways to migrate from HP to Selenium?

Let me share the answers I found. Some come from my blog, others from friends and partner blogs. Here goes:

The Scalability Argument for Service Enabling Your Applications. I make the case for building, deploying, and testing SOA services effectively. I point out the weakness of this approach comes at the tool and platform level. For example, 37% of an application's code simply to deploy your service.

How PushToTest Uses Agile Software Development Methodology To Build TestMaker. A conversation I had with Todd Bradfute, our lead sales engineer, on surfacing the results of using Agile methodology to build software applications.

"Selenium eclipsed HP’s QTP on job posting aggregation site Indeed.com to become the number one requisite job experience / skill for on-line posted automated QA jobs (2700+ vs ~2500 as of this writing,)" John Dunham, CEO at Sauce Labs, noted.

Run Private Clouds For Cost Savings and Control. Instead of running 400 Amazon EC2 machine instances, Plinga uses Eucalyptus to run its own cloud. Plinga needed the control, reliability, and cost-savings of running its own private cloud, Marten Mickos, CEO at Eucalyptus, reports in his blog.

How To Evaluate Highly Scalable SOA Component Architecture. I show how to evaluate highly scalable SOA component architecture. This is ideal for CIOs, CTOs, Development and Test Executives, and IT managers.

Planning A TestMaker Installation. TestMaker features test orchestration capabilities to run Selenium, Sahi, soapUI, and unit tests written in Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, and other langauges in a Grid and Cloud environment. I write about the issues you may encounter installing the TestMaker platform.

Repurposing ThoughtWorks Twist Scripts As Load and Performance Tests. I really like ThoughtWorks Twist for building functional tests in an Agile process. This blog and screencast shows how to rapidly find performance bottlenecks in your Web application using Thoughtworks Twist with PushToTest TestMaker Enterprise test automation framework.

4 Steps To Getting Started With The Open Source Test Engagement Model. I describe the problems you need to solve as a manager to get started with Open Source Testing in your organization.

Corellation Technology Finds The Root Cause To Performance Bottlenecks. Use aspect-oriented (AOP)  technology to surface memory leaks, thread deadlocks, and slow database queries in your Java Enterprise applications.

10 Agile Ways To Build and Test Rich Internet Applicatiions (RIA.) Shows how competing RIA technologies put the emphasis on test and deploy.

Oracle Forms Application Testing. Java Applet technology powers Oracle Forms and many Web applications. This blog shows how to install and use open source tools to test Oracle Forms applications.

Saving Your Organization From The Eventual Testing Meltdown of Using Record/Playback Solely. The Selenium project is caught between the world of proprietary test tool vendors and the software developer community. This blog talks about the tipping-point.

Choosing Java Frameworks for Performance. A round-up of opinions on which technologies are best for building applications: lightweight and responsive, RIA, with high developer productivity.

Selenium 2: Using The API To Create Tests. A DZone Refcard we sponsored to explain how to build tests of Web applications using the new Selenium 2 APIs. For the Selenium 1 I wrote another Refcard, click here.

Test Management Tools. A discussion I had with the Zephyr test management team on Agile testing.

Migrating From HP Mercury QTP To PushToTest TestMaker 6. HP QTP just can't deal with the thousands of new Web objects coming from Ajax-based applications. This blog and screencast shows how to migrate.

10 Tutorials To Learn TestMaker 6. TestMaker 6 is the easier way to surface performance bottlenecks and functional issues in Web, Rich Internet Applications (RIA, using Ajax, Flex, Flash,) Service Oriented Architecture (SOA,) and Business Process Management (BPM) applications.

5 Easy Ways To Build Data-Driven Selenium, soapUI, Sahi Tests. This is an article on using the TestMaker Data Production Library (DPL) system as a simple and easy way to data-enable tests. A DPL does not require programming or scripting.

Open Source Testing (OST) Is The Solution To Modern Complexity. Thanks to management oversite, negligence, and greed British Petroleum (BP) killed 11 people, injured 17 people, and dumped 4,900,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. David Brooks of the New York Times became an unlikely apologist for the disaster citing the complexity of the oil drilling system.

Choosing automated software testing tools: Open source vs. proprietary.  Colleen Fry's article from 2010  discusses why software testers decide which type of automated testing tool, or combination of open source and proprietary, to best meets their needs. We came a long way in 2011 to achieve these goals.

All of my blogs are found here.

Free Open Source Agile Web Application Performance Testing Workshop
Your organization may have adopted Agile Software Development Methodology and forgot about load and performance testing! In my experience this is pretty common. Between Scrum meetings, burn-down sessions, sprints, test first, and user stories, many forms of testing - including load and performance testing, stress testing, and integration testing - can get lost. And, it is normally not only your fault. Consider the following:

• The legacy proprietary test tools - HP LoadRunner, HP QTP, IBM Rational Tester, Microsoft VSTS - are hugely expensive. Organizations can't afford to equip developers and testers with their own licensed copies. These tools licenses are contrary to Agile testing, where developers and testers work side-by-side building and testing concurrently.
  
  
• Many testers still cannot write test code. Agile developers write unit tests in high level languages (Java, C#, PHP, Ruby.) Testers need a code-less way to repurpose these tests into functional tests, load and performance tests, and production service monitors.
  
  
• Business managers need a code-less way to define the software release requirements criteria. Agile developers see Test Management tools (like HP Quality Center QC) as a needless extra burden to their software development effort. Agile developers are hugely attracted to Continuous Integration (CI) tools like Hudson, Jenkins, Cruise Control, and Bamboo. Business managers need anintegrated CI and test platform to define requirements and see how close to 'shipping' is their application.
  

Lucky for you there is a way to learn how to solve these problems and deliver Agile software development methodology benefits to your organization. The Agile Web Application Performance Testing Workshop is your place to learn the Agile Open Source Testing way to load and performance test your Web applications, Rich Internet Applications (RIA, using Ajax, Flex, Flash, Oracle Forms, Applets,) and SOAP and REST Web services. This free Webinar delivers a testing methodology, tools, and best/worst practices to follow. Plus, you will see a demonstration of a dozen open source test tools all working together.

Registration is free! Click here to learn more and register now:

Help Is Here To Learn TestMaker, Selenium, Sahi, soapUI Do you sometimes feel alone? Have you been trying any of the following:

• Writing Load Test Scripts
• Building Functional Tests for Smoke and Regression Testing
  
• Trying to use Selenium IDE and needing a good tutorial
• Configuring test management tools working with TestMaker, Sahi, and soapUI
• Needing To Compare Selenium Vs HP QuickTest Pro (QTP)
• Stuck While Doing Cloud Computing Testing
• Need Help Getting Starting with Load Testing Tools

If you feel stuck, need help, or would like to see how professional testers solve these situations, then please attend a free live weekly Webinar.



Here Is What We Have For You Bring your best questions, issues, and bug reports on installing, configuring, and using PushToTest TestMaker to our free weekly Workshop via live Webinar. PushToTest experts will be available to answer your questions.

Frank Cohen, CEO and Founder at PushToTest, and members of the PushToTest technical team will answer your questions, show you where to find solutions, and take your feedback for feature enhancements and bug reports.

Every Thursday at 1 pm Pacific time (GMT-8)
Registration Required

At the Webinar:

1. Register for the Webinar in-advance
2. Log-in to the Webinar at the given day and time
3. Each person that logs-in will have their turn, ask their question, and hear our response
4. You may optionally share/show your desktop for the organizers to see what is going wrong and offer a solution
5. The organizers will hear as many questions as will fit in 1 hour. No guarantee that everyone will be served.

See how these tools were made to work together. Bring your best questions for an immediate answer!

A Look Forward To Open Source Load Testing Tools

You and I have come after some incredibly smart people. They inspire us to do our best when testing software for functionality, performance under load, and scalability.

The problems you need to solve are testing applications and business processes that use Rich Internet Application (RIA, using Ajax, Flex, Flash, Oracle Forms, Applets,) SOA, BPM, and SOAP and REST Web Service interfaces.

Thankfully you don’t have to be Einstein, Edison, Curie, or Tesla to “get” this stuff. You just need a good set of free open source test tools, a good methodology, and a good coach.
Upcoming Free Webinar Workshops On Open Source Load Testing
PushToTest will host 6 free Workshops via live Webinar in January 2012. Each Workshop features training for  performance testing using Selenium, soapUI, Sahi, JUnit, and TestMaker. Registration is free. Sign-up now while seats last.

Agile Open Source Performance Test Workshop for CIOs, CTOs, Business Managers
January 4, 2012
 
Agile Open Source Performance Test Workshop for Developers, Testers, IT Managers
January 5, 2012
  
Open Source Test Workshop for CIOs, CTOs, Business Managers
January 11, 2012
 
Selenium, soapUI, Sahi, TestMaker Workshop for Testers, Developers, IT Ops
January 12, 2012
 
Use Selenium, soapUI, Sahi, TestMaker Performance Testing In Your Organization
January 25, 2012
 
Load Testing Using Agile Open Source Tools for Developers, Testers, IT Managers
January 26, 2012
 
Agile Open Source Performance Test Workshop for CIOs, CTOs, Business Managers
February 14, 2012
 
Agile Open Source Performance Test Workshop for Developers, Testers, IT Managers
February 16, 2012
 
Free Webinar: Solve Performance Bottlenecks and Function Problems In Your Web Applications
February 22, 2012
 
Open Source Test Workshop for Developers, Testers, IT Ops
February 23, 2012

All Workshops are free, registration is limited, and this is an interactive Webinar where you ask your best questions.