If you are a good QA or just a good agile developer I’m sure you’re already testing your web applications with tools such as Selenium.(*)
If you’re seeking for continuous improvement I’m sure that you complained at least once on the speed of those testing and on the maintainability.
You might wanna then have a look on the results that the guys of Celerity have posted on their website, basically they migrated all their Watir functional tests wrapping htmlUnit instead of starting the browser through Watir.
First benchmarks are impressive:
| Scenario | Watir (total) | Celerity (total) | Time reduction |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 316,97 s | 0,59 s | 99,81 % |
| 2 | 278 s | 86 s | 69 % |
| 3 | 128 s | 33 s | 74 % |
| 4 | 185,00 s | 4,67 s | 97,48 % |
If you are using Selenium rather than Watir don’t despair, Simon Stewart is working hard on webdriver, and if you switch to the htmlUnit driver your Selenium test you’ll have comparable improvements on the speed of your tests.
(*) many people might disagree with this sentence, if so have a look first the Simon Stewart presentation at GTAC 2007 and then let me know your thoughts.
One Comment
I am working on schnell which does also something similar to celerity but is now using webdriver htmlunit driver to work. But one of the major disadvantage with such tests is that they don’t exercise javascript or any client side dependent components like flex or silverlight in a real scenario. Htmlunit uses Rhino engine which is not used by most of the browser. This seems to be a catch here. So if you are fine with that as well if your tests don’t exercise a lot of javascript then you have no problems with these tools.