Hacker News Reader

Comment by Osmose | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious to see what the usage stats on the IDE are; my company (Mozilla, ironically) uses Selenium a ton, but as far as I know we write all of our tests by hand instead of with the IDE since it allows you to use patterns like Page objects to make your tests more maintainable in the long run. Although the last time I used the IDE was years ago, so it may be more flexible than it used to be.

Does anyone extensively use the IDE?

View on HN

This is the great feature of the Ide. Kick start your tests, then you "upgrade" to hand coding. Great for learning about a new system, or to get help from less technical people when the house is on fire.

Back when I was using it (about 4 years ago), we used it mostly as a debugging aid to understand what actually should go into some expressions.

Also some people from QA, without coding skills, would use it.

We started to adapt Selenium IDE to allow people who don't have extensive coding backgrounds to automate manual testing they're already doing. It provided massive time savings when used properly. This news will likely completely kill the initiative.

IDE is a good way to kickstart the tests, it allows non-technical people to create skeletons for tests which can then be touched up/prettified/refactored by devs.

This describes exactly my/our experience. Test recording can be a great time saver when used properly. Sure, a Java or Python guru can write a webdriver test in "seconds", but she usually does not want too. Plus the "seconds" often turn into hours of coding and debugging ;-)

I didn't know this existed. I always write the tests in JS using .click() .focus() etc.

previous company used it quite extensively, especially if there's a new feature the enterprise software that needs testing by the QA team

we did write the test by hand tho, very DSL-like & really targeted at non-programmer

Reply on news.ycombinator.com