4/06/2015

Look! No Hands! - Using Selenium and Node.js for interactive UI testing

Selenium is the most talked about UI testing framework that I could find that was both open source and well supported. We decided to adopt it for our automated UI testing. I have found it to be very useful, albeit with a stiff learning curve. One downside for me is the back and forth between building tests and then waiting for Selenium and the browsers to open and run the tests. It occurred to me I could help alleviate this by having the browsers at the ready and eagerly waiting for the command to start testing. So I reached into my toolbox to grab one of my favorite tools, Node.js. Using Node.js I was able to build an interactive interface with which I can iteratively build my front end tests. Everything I needed was already there, I just had to put pieces together.