Using Selenium IDE to automate web testing is really easy. It's not so easy, though, to automate execution of those tests.
In a Maven project, you can try to use maven-selenium-plugin to accomplish the task. It is possible to do so, but it has some limitations that were deal breakers for us, such as the inability to run in a remote selenium server. Most of those limitations are lifted when using jUnit tests instead of recorded Selenium IDE scripts, but those require skills in our testing teams or time from our development teams that we currently do not have.
Selenium IDE can save a test as a jUnit case, but then it cannot open it. As a one way street, it is unsuitable for a testing team without programming skills.
This plugin is an attempt to release the testing teams from manual, repetitive work, enabling the tests execution to be automated in a versatile way, and not disabling the testers' ability to run each test as they please in the IDE.
I don't think this is ultimately a good testing strategy. It is far from maintainable, or flexible. But... Right now, our testing teams are filled with work, so they don't get time to learn a programming language, so they can't automate, so they get even less time. This is a negative feedback loop, and has to be broken somehow.
By automating the tests in, say, a nightly build, we'll get the desired feedback every morning, without any effort from testing besides recording.
As a Maven plugin, this artifact should be plugged to the generate-test-sources lifecycle phase, as it will try to parse Selenium IDE scripts and build jUnit test cases to be run by failsafe or surefire.
By default, the plugin will:
- look for files in src/test/html
- Attempt to parse every file in that directory
- NOT run. skip defaults to true!
- connect to a Selenium server in localhost:4444
- Build tests suffixed by ITCase, so failsafe will pick them by default
All of these settings, and some other, less relevant ones, can be overriden in the plugin's configuration.
One of the key components of the plugin is the Commands class, which holds the knowledge of how to translate each Selenium IDE command to Java statements that do the same. This class is hardly complete. It is enough so far for the scripts written by the teams I'm currently working with, but they keep learning commands and the list is only getting bigger.
This software is licensed under the GPLv2.