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Comment by jph | Hacker News Reader

Selenium IDE is a tremendous help for projects that want integration testing, and want to enable any team member to write ballpark tests.

Selenium IDE saved us hundreds or thousands of hours.

For example, my team took an existing web app with no tests, and had the project manager and junior business analysis go through the entire app with the Selenium IDE, writing tests.

This enabled our dev team to start coding fast, and refactoring fast.

In parallel our QA team then took those tests and used them as first-drafts to create even better tests that were generic, maintainable, randomizable, and so forth.

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If you say that "Selenium IDE saved us hundreds or thousands of hours", why not convince your company to donate 10% of the money saved back to Selenium, so that they maybe have the resources to actually pay someone to continue development of these useful tools?

This is not how capitalism works

Actually it is; there are subsidies for open source projects all over the VC funded technology industry.

oddly enough, when your capitalist corporation would implode if the open source operating system it depends upon were to suddenly stop development... the corporation needs to pay to support the project or risk falling behind to its capitalist contemporaries!

the system works (in this example)!

Except when it is.

Investing resources is great marketing, trains your developers if they're working on it and gains you influence to improve the parts you need improved.

I think that there are plenty of reasons for companies not to contribute. Not many companies have spare engineering capacity for working on OSS. Of those that do, they have to choose where to spend the effort --- testing tools aren't as exciting as Machine Learning, or the latest JS framework, or.... Of course, once you start hacking on the code, you may find you like it a lot. :)

The IDE is a mature, and old product too, so even if engineers can spend time hacking on it, getting up to speed can be tricky. The Selenium project has an active "selenium-developers" google group, a #selenium IRC channel on freenode, and a Slack channel, where many of the core team can be found.

Which is a long way of saying that it's not always easy for even motivated individuals and companies to contribute to OSS.

Just to get an other datapoint: we used to build tests for selenium with selenium ide too, but quickly found out that the used selectors for the elements often had to be manually tweaked, and so we switched to http://nightwatchjs.org/ for our tests, and write them by hand.

Tests are more reliable now, and devs are happy with it. Based on my (limited) experience, selenium ide is not something that is absolutely needed. It's a fine piece of software, but devs can do fine without.

Are these E2E tests robust?

I found they often break easily

Yes they work. The only thing you have to watch out for is the timing for the assertions with

    .waitForElementVisible('[name="main"]', 10000)

otherwise you sometimes check for a value in a field, but the field is not there yet, and the test fails.

That's the only gotcha we found we have to be careful about.

Have you tried Helium? https://heliumhq.com/

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