Rails acceptance testing with Selenium RC

My colleague Ben has just published a Rails plugin which should simplify setting up Selenium Remote Control to run acceptance tests for your Rails app. So read his article and give it a whirl.

Selenium tests run directly in the browser. You can run the same Selenium test against different browsers e.g. for browser compatability testing (all mainstream JavaScript-enabled browsers are supported). You can also use Selenium to test Ajax-based web applications. If you’re not familiar with Selenium, have a read about it and watch some tests run in your browser.

Jason Huggins gave a talk at the London Test Automation Conference on recording screencast-style movies during execution of Selenium tests as a way to generate up-to-date documentation. I was interested, because we’d knocked a similar idea around the office a few weeks previously.

He tried to demo it as part of a continuous integration setup with CruiseControl. Unfortunately his ambitious demo, involving Parallels Desktop, multiple virtual machines, multiple operating systems, multiple languages & multiple browsers, didn’t quite work during the talk itself, but I did see it working afterwards – it was pretty neat.