Selenium Webdriver Alternatives? Perhaps with the ability to use existing session as well?

[roosevelt]

Hey Developers,

I have been using Selenium Web Driver for my automated tests and it is quite powerful for what it does. The Selenium IDE for Firefox is ok but I think hand written codes work better for my complex projects. It's lot easier to organize too. However, I noticed that using the Web Driver the major drawback is that I cannot utilize an existing browser session.

What I'd really like to do is start my browser, go to my website, login and run a particular test. If it fails, I will make my quick changes and run it again. Since, the WebDriver launches a whole new browser and a whole new session, the test has to login, navigate to the right pages, do any prerequisite steps, etc. This just wastes time and costs bandwidth as well. I tend to run selenium tests over the cloud and I want to minimize my costs and time as much as possible.

Is there any other similar testing tool that I can run against an existing browser session? And what are some reliable if not totally free testing tools out there?

[Seahorsepip Veteran]

Never really used a testing tool, I'm used to writing proper code. What do they exactly test by the way?

[roosevelt]

Never really used a testing tool, I'm used to writing proper code. What do they exactly test by the way?

Hi, tools like Selenium are mostly used for regression/functional testing of a web app. As you create more complex web apps or a web app is developed by teams of various background and experience, tests become essential fairly quickly. There's no guarantee what mistake someone may have done and the worst is when the web apps don't work exactly the same in major browsers. Automated tests allow you to easily test your web app in different browsers (even simultaneously) before pushing it out to production.

[Jub]

Never really used a testing tool, I'm used to writing proper code. What do they exactly test by the way?

Lol, there's no such thing. When you move beyond  HTML pages with some basic styles and jQuery plugins, you'll need testing tools.

[Seahorsepip Veteran]

Lol, there's no such thing. When you move beyond  HTML pages with some basic styles and jQuery plugins, you'll need testing tools.

Backend code will always work the same and the frontend always consists of html, css and js

The main problem these days is that the visual frontend gets too complex and starts showing inconsistencies across browsers  That's why I'm a huge fan of writing webpages as minimal as possible(so they work everywhere) and then add fancy stuff on top of that, so that the website can always fallback.

Though this is indeed easier to say then done, I even find myself writing browser specific code....

[Jub]

Backend code will always work the same and the frontend always consists of html, css and js

The main problem these days is that the visual frontend gets too complex and starts showing inconsistencies across browsers  That's why I'm a huge fan of writing webpages as minimal as possible(so they work everywhere) and then add fancy stuff on top of that, so that the website can always fallback.

Though this is indeed easier to say then done, I even find myself writing browser specific code....

Yep, but like I said, when you get to writing "custom" JavaScript, i.e. not using plugins, you'll most likely end up needing testing tools -- even if it's only to run a series of sanity checks. This is especially true when you work with other people, and even more so when the project is open source.

You're right though; everything is getting so freaking complicated and complex these days. Three years ago a client was super-happy to have a simple, blog-like WordPress template, lol.