Working on a new IDE for Selenium

[Chris Merrill]

I've been playing around with a design for a better IDE for Selenium for a while now. Those efforts have finally come far enough for me to slap on a 0.1 release label on it and let it out in the wild :)

You can find it at http://ide4selenium.com/ , with links to a 2-minute demo video, documentation and downloads at the bottom of the page. The MuseIDE is free.

I was inspired by the ease-of-use and low learning curve of SeleniumIDE, but for my usage, I need a much more powerful tool. My goals are:
- intuitive UI
- interactive debugging
- minimize coding - testers should be able to build automated tests without coding
- handle complex workflows (conditionals, looping, variable scoping, etc)
- extensible - make it easy to add new capabilities and share those extensions with others.
- maintainable - easily re-use test logic (such as a login process); eliminate duplication of data (especially element locators)
- integration - fit well into team environments and agile tooling. For example: open text formats that play well with version control systems, command-line operation, JUnit-compatible reports, etc.
- compatibility - Import tests from Selenese (SeleniumIDE format), expose as much of the Selenium APIs as possible
- record a workflow for a quick-start on a testcase (and record from multiple browsers)

This first release demonstrates all of the above, except for the recording, which doesn't exist at all (yet). Unlike SeleniumIDE, this is not a browser plugin, but a desktop program (Java). It is definitely not ready for production use - hence the 0.1 label. Coverage of the Selenium API is fairly low, no waits are implemented, the ability to build large test suites is fairly limited, etc. But I want to get it out and see if anyone else is interested in using it.

All of the underlying code required to execute tests built with MuseIDE is a separate project, the Muse Test Framework, which I've open-sourced at https://github.com/ChrisLMerrill/muse . This includes the code to read/write the test files, load projects, run tests and test suites, and generate reports. It is all included with the MuseIDE, so if you plan to install that, you don't need to download or install the framework separately. The wiki at the github site will help you get started if you want to poke into the code.


If you are interested in a tool like this, I'd love to hear what you think about my take on it. Does the demo video appeal to you? What features are important to you?

All feedback is welcome and I'll answer questions here or at: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/museide

[Anne kootstra]

It's been an hour since I became aware of your project and I've been opening files and seeing how to change things to better understand it. Truth be told, it was indeed the video that convinced me to invest an hour or two into it. So, consider this to be a successful way of interacting with your users. As a developer I can certainly see the effort that went into creating MuSe and I think sharing early on will certainly provide you with a lot of feedback. Good and bad, which goes without saying. 

All in all I like the visual aspect of the editor. Considering this is version 0.1 I'll forgo the more advanced features one would find in the more mature enterprise testing package. A personal thing I quickly ran into that nearly prevented me from continuing was having no File->Open feature. Having to close the application and then going back to the command line is very counter-intuitive for the visual oriented IT person. Similarly that same remark will apply to other functionality, but considering the phase of the application is in, this is quite understandable. 

[Chris Merrill]

Anne,

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it is rather embarassingly incomplete and can scarcely be called an IDE without any sort of project navigation. Thanks for your understanding of that point.

I currently have that pushed back in favor of other features, such as
- more complete coverage of the WebDriver APIs
- breakpoints
- step in / over during debugging
- recording plugins for Chrome, IE and FF
- UI for building test suites
- iteration on lists (especially element lists)
- capturing logs from webdriver and the browser
- capturing screenshots

But perhaps that is not the right prioritization. Only feedback will tell, hence why I've put it out there now :)

If you don't mind me asking, which of the features from the homepage were compelling to you?
http://ide4selenium.com/

Thanks again!
Chris