new Selenium IDE maintainer - Peter Kehl

[Luke Inman-Semerau]

Hi Peter,

I personally don't touch any of the IDE code (or try not to). As you've seen it's not gotten much love in the past and we need more maintainers of it. Since you appear to be one of the very few developers who attempt to make enhancements to the IDE, I do agree that you should be allowed to have commit rights to Selenium and thus be able to improve it for the future.

+ Selenium Developers

Please chime if about the proposal to give Peter the commit bit so he can help move IDE along :)

-Luke

P.S. personally I see IDE as needing a major overhaul, with RC going away everything should align more with the WebDriver paradigm and exporters should only be in WebDriver format. Commands should also start becoming more WebDriver analogous rather than RC analogous. I'm not sure how that is easily accomplished nor am I willing to put in the effort to do so... so that's about as far as my influence goes :)

On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 12:28 PM, Peter Kehl <peter...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Luke,

Thank you for maintaining Selenium. And for your earlier merging of my pull requests.

Selenium IDE has a "hotfix" bug: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/issues/1653 (garbling relative paths to test cases). It rarely affects users. However, when it hits, it confuses a hell out of them: the bug only shows up on a subsequent opening of a test suite. That annoys people.

Because of a delayed effect, the defect wasn't easy to report and replicate. Therefore the actual number of frustrated users will be higher than who commented on the issue.

Please, would you merge my fix https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pull/2654. (I see that Travis-CI marked it as failed. However, that comes from firefox-driver, which I haven't changed.)

Also, I'd like to improve Selenium IDE. Would you also add me to Selenium organization.

Looking forward to our co-operation,

-Peter Kehl
Sydney, Australia
http://selite.github.io
+61-4-3369-8020

[Simon Stewart]

Hi Luke,

I've no objection to Peter getting the commit bit --- having someone actively maintain IDE is a Good Idea, provided we still believe that IDE is a product that we should be maintaining.

The arguments for something like IDE (or Builder), is that it makes it easy for folks to step into the world of Selenium. Sometimes, that's just to throw together a quick sample test case, or to demonstrate an issue. Sometimes it's because folks aren't familiar with a programming language, and so can't write tests any other way. Sometimes that's just The Way We Do Things Here. All of those are valid reasons for using IDE.

OTOH, it's clearly less than ideal that both products are getting very little TLC, and IDE in particular doesn't align well with the WebDriver APIs. There's also the argument that some folks are leaning too heavily on IDE, and are never taking the step to the programmatic APIs, leading to hard to maintain and unwieldy test suites, and a rubbish experience using Selenium.

What do people think?

Simon

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[Jason Leyba]

It's no secret I'm against IDE/Builder. Getting started with programmatic APIs is not that hard and we do a disservice to or users by providing the crutch that is IDE.

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[David Stark]

As the developer of Builder, I agree with Simon's points. Builder is more congruent with WebDriver, but it also hasn't seen a lot of love lately, as it's become less of a priority for Sauce Labs.

I do think that IDE/Builder are useful tools, as an on-ramp or complement to using the APIs. The main thing that helps there is local playback, which is unfortunately not currently possible in Builder (or IDE?) due to tightened security policies in Firefox. I plan to look into Marionette or some built-in control panel for Selenium Server as a solution for local playback. Anyone with knowledge of Marionette who'd like to help me in this endeavor, do contact me!

Long-term, what I would really like to get into is support for page objects, basically allowing for tests to be recorded in terms of the page semantics rather than as a long, unstructured mess of individual steps. We'll see.

- David

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[Daniel Davison]

I certainly see the merit in keeping around the IDE. it's surprising how many organizations still use it, and as it's been pointed out, it's very good to start ramping up with Selenium.  

It is also very nice having the IDE around for people that want "quick automation" wins.  obviously it's not the solution for a regression suite, but very good for quick automation tasks which i think a lot of people use it for.

I don't disagree with having a maintainer of the IDE.  I'm not sure what the plans were with the builder, but I'd like to see an entirely new redesign of the IDE/Builder.  So +1 to having a maintainer of "some" sort that would be willing to refactor and rebrand :)

[Leo Laskin]

Also not bad to have IDE around as the Selenium whipping boy which is where we say "don't do this if you want to do it the right way"

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[Christopher Merrill]

Hope you don't mind me chiming in here.

From what I can tell, there is a lot of demand for a tool that allows non-coding testers to build automated tests. I agree that SeleniumIDE leads them down a path to disappointment. I don't know enough about Selenium Builder to comment on it. The other unfortunate truth is that on the path to becoming strong coders, they are weak coders. During that time, they tend to create a mess that is just as un-maintainable as a SeleniumIDE test suite. Or worse.

While I _am_ a coder, I'd prefer to build my tests with as little coding as possible, so I can share the work with other (non-coding) testers. More importantly, you can do things in a SeleniumIDE-like tool that you can't do with code...like backup and re-run a step with a different locator at the point of failure (my debugger doesn't have a back button). Or interactively highlight the element as the user types the locators. Or a dozen other higher-level features...you get the idea.

Anyway, for me this is an itch that I've been trying to scratch, and I've made decent progress on an IDE for Selenium. My primary goals are:

- ease of use and short learning curve

- encourage single-source for configuration data (such as element locators, browser capabilities, etc) to reduce maintenance

- encourage re-use of logic (e.g. user-defined functions, etc)

- easily extensible for coders - the idea is not to eliminate custom code, but to make it easy for a coder to extend the tool and make that extension usable by the non-coders as easily as the built-in functions.

- good integration into agile environments, CI systems, etc. with good command-line interfaces, standard output formats, VCS-friendly file formats, etc.

- not limited to Selenium...could write custom steps to call web services or execute a database query

- eventually provider higher-level help, such as refactoring, automatic detection of duplicate locators, page-objects-like modeling, etc

It is pretty early in development...coverage of the WebDriver APIs is kinda slim, but enough to get the idea across. Like most projects, I _really_ need more/better documentation  :)

If you are interested, you can see a quick demo at:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpiARJrnNzs

the main site is at:

  http://ide4selenium.com/

and the underlying open-source framework is at:

  https://github.com/ChrisLMerrill/muse

Curious to hear what you think about it.

Chris

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[David Stark]

Builder originally started as a fork of the Windmill recorder by a startup called Go Test It. It was bought by Sauce Labs who open sourced it and have been supporting its development since. Compared to IDE, it has better support for Selenium 2 / Webdriver. It used to have the ability to play back scripts in the current browser session, but stricter security requirements by Mozilla have killed that feature for the more recent Firefox versions.

It has its own JSON-based format that shoehorns the Webdriver API back into a linear sequence of steps while trying to bridge the gaps in semantics between Selenium 1 and 2. It also has its own tiny ecosystem of playback software for its format that allows people to do things like CI.

As for its future, I am keeping it working for new versions of Firefox when they come along, as well as fixing bugs and adding requested features. I've started looking into using Marionette to resurrect its ability to do local playback.

I'm fully aware that it's kind of silly to have two projects that do essentially the same thing. I personally think that Builder is the more "modern, clean and simple" option of the two, but of course I'd think that, I wrote most of it. :P

I'd be interested to hear ideas for a more radical redesign that makes it more useful / current.

- David

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[Christopher Merrill]

David, can you envision that 'radical redesign' to be distributed as a standalone program (rather than a browser plug-in)?

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