Selenium is a suite of free, community-developed tools for automated testing of web applications. It provides test recording and playback, and supports test playback in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. For our testing purposes, we use two tools in the suite: Selenium IDE and Selenium Core.
Selenium IDE is a Firefox extension that lets you record, edit, and debug Selenium tests. To start it, launch Firefox and choose Selenium IDE in the Tools menu. In the IDE window, you can create a test suite and record all the test cases you want to make, then save them to your hard drive in the file format of your choice. HTML, Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby are all supported formats, but we save the test cases as HTML so we can re-use them in our IE test suite (more on this later).
Selenium Core can do a lot of things, but we're only interested in the TestRunner tool, which we use to run our HTML test cases in Internet Explorer. To run the test cases, you need to create a test suite file in an HTML editor and add links to the HTML test case files created in IDE. To see how to do this, you can look at the example test suite files included in Selenium Core.
After that's done, run TestRunner by double-clicking TestRunner.HTA in the Core Dir\Core folder where you unzipped the Selenium Core package. Then enter the path and name of the test suite you want to run in the Test Suite box and click Go.
Real-World Selenium
For one large customer project, we run test cases against four different online stores in three difference locales. For each store, we've grouped the test cases into a test suite file. This test suite file is the master test case list and can be loaded into either Selenium IDE or TestRunner,depending which browser needs to be tested.
Installing Selenium IDE
In Firefox, go to http://seleniumhq.org/.
Click the Download tab.
Download the Selenium IDE.
Click Install Now. This will automatically install Selenium IDE in Firefox. You will need to restart Firefox to use IDE.
Installing Selenium Core
Go to http://seleniumhq.org/.
Click the Download tab.
Download the Selenium Core package to your local system.
Unzip the Core package. TestRunner application is located in the folder where you unzipped Core, under Core Dir\Core.