
How did I get started with Selenium? I was an avid user of HP QTP test automation tool and one day while looking for the testing solution I noticed an new tool on a software testing market called Selenium. I have decided to give a try by using it for several iterations of my personal web site, lots of trials and errors, lots of experiments, than brought it to the office and presented to other team members. I will try to explain the way I picked it up and got to where I am today.
Selenium tutorial and documentation
Selenium has a distinct advantage in terms of resources for beginners. The SeleniumHQ website site has encyclopedic documentation covering the fundamentals of web testing with Selenium, comprehensive get started with Selenium tutorial and free download access to the latest releases and source of all the Selenium component namely Selenium IDE, Selenium Server, Selenium Client Drivers, Selenium Grid and many others tools.
Selenium books
Selenium documentation is a great tool and it would help a lot, but recently the main resource in our team is Selenium Simplified by Alan Richardson and Selenium Testing Tools: Beginners Guide
Getting help with Selenium
Imagine that after reading Selenium tutorial QA Tester have downloaded and installed Selenium, created and executed a few test cases, but suddenly get stuck with a weird problem using Selenium. There are several places where Selenium user can search for help. The Selenium User Group is the first place where anyone could ask for help about Selenium. The group is very active and users post around fifteen hundreds messages per month. The usual recommendation is to search the group before asking for help, perhaps someone already found the solution for problem QA Tester is facing right now.
Conclusion
The step for learning Selenium can be summarized as follows
- Begin with Selenium documentation and tutorial
- Download, install and start using Selenium IDE trying out many of the examples provided
- Buy and study Selenium books, if needed.
- Use Selenium user group for research and specific help