Sunday, September 7, 2008

Why a Selenium Farmer

For my first blog post, I figured that I should talk a little bit about myself and what it means to be a Selenium Farmer at Google. I first got introduced to Selenium because some people I knew embraced this tool as the golden goose for testing web applications. Selenium could be the powerful tool we needed to use to create large scale integration tests and automate the manual tester out of the picture. Selenium's ability to automate the web browser was unparalleled and extremely powerful. It took the place of a user and could do anything that a manual tester could do at a larger scale, a lot faster, more reliably, and for a lot less money to a company. It was a thrilling technology and investment in it was made.

In practice, Selenium isn't the perfect tool for all testing. It leaves a bit to be desired in some of its abilities and functionalities, however it carries great potential and as an open source project, it is thrilling that anyone can be a part of contributing to the effort. At first an end user of the Selenium Remote Control, I was able to see some of the things that Selenium lacked, and I wanted to make myself a part of making the tool better. I wanted to be at the head of the effort to make it the chosen option for large tests for web applications. So, I made my debut as an open source community developer by contributing to this project.

I have a unique opportunity to see some of the issues that people have while using Selenium because I am a software engineer at Google. I get the chance to interact with Selenium test developers in a large and tightly knit community. Google's web applications are at the cutting edge of browser capability and test engineers there are at the cutting edge of testing these products. Consequently, Selenium, as one of the many testing tools used for exercising web products, is constantly being pushed to its limits. I get to see what works well and what doesn't from a first hand perspective, and I get to work on fixing these issues for my community and for others. I have a unique view into Google's Selenium Farm, which was the first major effort to do wide spread Selenium test distribution.

With this knowledge, I am writing this blog to share my experiences and my thoughts for the industry.