October 2010 Summaries

The author, Jason Huggins from Sauce Labs, will be in London on November 2-7 for various events related to Selenium and testing. He plans to attend a Selenium meetup at Google, speak at the London Software Craftsmanship Meetup about painless product demos and testing "untestable" applications, and participate in an open space "unconference" called CITCON London. The author invites anyone using Selenium in their work to reach out to him for informal chats during his flexible schedule.

At Sauce Labs, millions of real-world Selenium tests are run to identify common issues with the tool. To address these challenges, Selenium 2 aims to provide a comprehensive solution. Meanwhile, Sauce OnDemand has been optimized for SSL support and Unicode handling, addressing some of the biggest issues faced by users. The platform also now supports cross-browser file upload in all versions of Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox, as well as an automatic OS-level popup killer that deals with modal dialogs. Additionally, Selenium's proxy mode interfering with SSL connections has been resolved using a custom certificate authority, allowing for HTTPS testing without issues. Sauce OnDemand now automatically configures Internet Explorer to use Selenium as a proxy server, even in *iexplore mode, and provides custom profiles for Firefox to control the certificate environment. Full Unicode support is also available for all browsers, while cross-browser file upload has been implemented using OS-level hooks. An OS-level popup eliminator has been developed to automatically click "OK" or "Yes" in browser-level popups that appear in Internet Explorer.

Junit 4 and Selenium – Part Three: Parallelism and OnDemand` is a guide on how to run Selenium tests in parallel using JUnit 4. The author uses a custom `Parallelized` class to achieve this, which dynamically adjusts the thread pool size based on the number of test parameters. This allows for parallel execution of each test method regardless of the number of browsers or operating systems being tested. The guide also discusses how to use Sauce OnDemand, a cloud-based testing platform that integrates with Selenium scripts, to run tests in parallel without requiring the user to have multiple browsers installed locally. To accommodate this, the author uses a JSON string to pass configuration information to the Sauce OnDemand server, which is built using the Gson library. The guide concludes by highlighting the benefits of running Selenium tests in parallel and providing resources for further learning.

The current approach to modifying browser settings in Selenium tests is through a Properties file that can be loaded and used within the `@Parameters` method. This allows for changes to be made to the browsers used without requiring recompilation of the test code, making it a more efficient and maintainable solution.

In the current economic climate, software companies have seen impressive earnings and returned to profitability, with proprietary software companies thriving when the economy booms and struggling when it busts. Open source software has also performed well in this context, with many open source projects experiencing significant growth and success. This suggests that investing in open source can be a savvy bet, even during tough economic times.

The author reflects on their experience in software development, starting with a traditional Waterfall approach where development, testing, and operations teams worked in silos. They then transitioned to an Agile methodology, which introduced more collaboration between teams and the use of continuous integration and testing. The author's startup, focused on solving software testing problems, further accelerated this process by releasing code to production quickly, often daily, and using fast feedback systems to inform development decisions. This approach has led to a faster release cycle, improved process efficiency, and increased reliance on collaboration between teams.

Sauce Labs provides a platform that allows users to run tests created in Selenium IDE (in HTML format) with Selenium RC by utilizing its Sauce IDE tool. To use this platform, users must save the test case and test suite as HTML files, ensuring they have the correct file names and extensions. Once saved, Sauce RC can be instructed on where to find these files, including the path to the test suite and result directory, start URL, and browser selection. With this setup, users can run their tests against multiple browsers using Sauce RC, making it a convenient solution for cross-browser testing.