There’s shockingly little information out there about .NET web testing frameworks. As @greg_smalter and I have discussed, Selenium seems to be a little bit all over the place with their 2-years-ago “this tool is deprecated, it’s going to be completely replaced by this” and then recently they updated the deprecated tool and the new one still isn’t done. The alternative seems to be Telerik’s Test Studio.
A like Selenium and have used it in a few projects right now. The main thing I really like about it is that after you get a test working, you can modify something and then run those tests again to assert everything is still good to go. Selenium is free and that’s cool, but there’s a few things I’ve been noticing that are probably a result of that:
- They don’t seem to update very often, and because of this some problems exist like you can’t update Firefox because WebDriver only works with a particular version. Even though, it feels like all that has to be done to be “compatible” with the latest Firefox is to increment a number in some config file.
- They have a tool built for Firefox that allows you to run through a process and then export that test for whatever language/framework you’re using. First, the GUI is really bad. It’s very confusing to manually alter a command, and there’s constant “I finally found it in this large dropdown menu!” But you clicked on it wrong, or there’s no tab/enter behavior, so you lost what you just did and have to find it again. Second, the tests recorded are not always repeatable. Such as with Select2, the commands the test recorded records do not reproduce selecting an item in Select2. (This is not to say it doesn’t work at all with Select2: I just had to figure out how to deal with it manually).
- Greg has been in communicaitons with SauceLabs (used for running these web tests automatically), who don’t seem to respond very fast (or at all?)
So for the above reasons, Selenium is starting to not to feel like a good idea. I want to try Telerik’s Test Studio, but their licenses seem pretty costly. But that’s probably the cost of quality: their video demos are impressive, especially if their almost-exactly-the-same-tool works better than Selenium’s. However, we also have experience with the quality of Sitefinity…
On the plus side, they didn’t ask for my personal information before allowing me to download a free trial. I’ll report back here if I find out more.