208: Dynamic Selenium Grid using Zalenium with Diego Molina • Test Guild

Are you looking for a way to quickly create a disposable, flexible, container-based Selenium Grid infrastructure that has features like video recording, live preview, basic auth & online/offline dashboards? If so than this episode is for you. Diego Molina, one of the Selenium core committers, official maintainer of the Docker-Selenium project and the creator of Zalenium, shares his automation knowledge.

About Diego Molina

Diego Fernando Molina is a Senior Software Engineer at Element34, specialized in testing infrastructure, training and test coaching, with the end goal to help people test better. He is one of the maintainers of the official docker-selenium project, and he is the co-creator of Zalenium, a dynamic Selenium Grid. He spends most of his time developing Selenium related solution, working with customers and finding ways to do UI testing in a more simple way. You can find him often in the IRC/Slack channel for Selenium.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

Zalenium is trying to solve the very common issue that a lot of people have. It’s when you have some tests and you want to start running them in parallel. So you want to start getting into Selenium Grid.
The most common issue is that you need to start to keep up with the release of the new Selenium Versions and to have them in synchronization with the with the browser releases and the browser drivers release like chrome driver, gecko driver and so on. So people are usually spending a lot of time into configuring all these moving parts.
So our idea is not to replace cloud services like Sauce Labs because I think that when you want to do more extensive testing you need like an enterprise solution. This is targeted to be used as a combination. For example if you are a small startup and you don’t have a big budget to have the cloud maybe you could use Zalenium of your normal iterations in the development process. But when you want to do a big release you could use the integration because Zalenium allows you to run your tests on Chrome or Firefox locally in your local network. But if you want to use a different browser like IE or Safari you could actually have an account in SauceLabs and proxy the tests that need to be executed in Safari or IE.
So right now we have the option to run. Zalenium in Docker, Kubernetes AWS and OpenShift
I think that the best advice I could give is that with all the new tools that are coming out. All the new things that are popping up every day like AI and machine learning. The first things that I like to consider are how could I put that new piece or new tool into my current process. And if the effort I need to do is way higher than the tool is giving me so that the benefit I’m getting from the tool is way lower than the effort I need to do to integrate. I need to reconsider all the things that I should do before actually getting started with the new tools.

Connect with Diego Molina

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