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.
