If you’re like me you would have thought that Selenium IDE was long dead and buried. And to be honest, I was glad to believe it was. But in this episode, Dave Haeffner will Test Talk about the rebirth of Selenium IDE and why it’s a good thing. Discover why Selenium IDE was resurrected and how it can help you. Listen up and learn about all of Selenium IDE’s improvements, and how they have made it better than it ever was before.

About Dave Haeffner

Dave is currently a software developer at Applitools and the writer of Elemental Selenium — a free, once weekly Selenium tip newsletter that is read by hundreds of testing professionals. He is also the creator and maintainer of ChemistryKit(an open-source Selenium framework). He has helped numerous companies successfully implement automated acceptance testing; including The Motley Fool, ManTech International, Sittercity, and Animoto. He is a founder and co-organizer of the Selenium Hangout and has spoken at numerous conferences and meetups about acceptance testing.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk with Dave Haeffner

• More recently I switched gears and decided to go full time to work at Applitools and the work that they’ve been doing on the Selenium IDE has been really tremendous. It’s actually really great to see because I think that the Selenium IDE and recording playback tools, in general, depending on which people you hang out with in test automation. There’s a stigma attached to record and playback. And I think that stigma is rightfully earned in certain aspects because I think that within the case of Selenium IDE I think that the tool wasn’t modernized or built to keep up to pace with some of the solutions to the known problems we have in the industry.
• Jason Huggins thinks that sometimes simple tools can be powerful and it can empower people to solve hard problems.
• The goal of Selenium IDE is to offer a really robust and useful tool to help people who might not have the capacity or skill to write tests with code. They want to be able to get running quickly. Or there are people who already have an existing set of selenium tests that they still want to run. I think that we want to try to make sure that everybody has the ability to do automated testing and do it well. And if some of them happened to use automated visual testing great but if not they still have a really useful powerful tool.
• I think that is always the balance of you can either have an opinionated tool or you can have a flexible tool that enables people to do what they want or intends to use with the tool. We’re not I think in the business of creating a tool that’s super opinionated or limiting because at the end of the day we want people who are using the old Selenium IDE to be able to use the new one and make sure the backward compatibility exists.
• We’re also looking to find ways to improve the selector accuracy which to my mind is probably this one of the single biggest things that people cite when they think of why record and playback tools are terrible is locator accuracy. I’ve been doing a lot of work on locator accuracy in particular over the last year or two around ways you can find better quality locators and I some of those practices can be applied to this tool.
• The best place to get plugged into the project that is you can actually just go to the SeleniumHQ GitHub organization and under the organizations, there is the Selenium IDE repo and that should have everything that you really need to know.

Connect with Dave Haeffner

• Blog:ElementalSelenium
• Twitter: @TourDeDave
• Selenium IDE: github

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