Information Technology Dark Side

I’ve been using the Selenium IDE as part of my exploratory testing sessions lately, which, if you don’t know, is a testing tool that records my interaction with a web site, allows me to replay it automatically, and also lets me export it as automated tests in various coding languages (Ruby, in my case).

Unfortunately, the format of automated tests I want to create is not supported by the Selenium IDE. The Ruby script it generates is for Unit::Test, not RSpec, which is the format I want. So over the last week I’ve gotten pretty good at generating the Unit::Test code and converting it to RSpec so we can run it in a headless grid integrated with our CI environment.

But I’d rather just export it as RSpec directly and skip the whole conversion process. As it turns out, it’s pretty easy to add a new exporting format to the Selenium IDE. So I did it, by modifying the code that creates Ruby - Unit tests so that it will create RSpec code instead. It only took about ten minutes to do, and the end result isn’t 100% perfect, but for most of the testing I do it will generate RSpec code that will run right the first time.

I know Selenium/RSpec doesn’t have a huge user base at the moment, but if anyone would like to download the file, here it is. I’m not reserving any rights to this - do what you want with it, use at your own risk. To install it, open the Selenium IDE, pick Options=>Options. Click on the formats tab, then the add button. You will see two fields, one tiny, one huge. In the tiny field, type Ruby - RSpec. In the huge field paste the entire contents of the file OVER the pre-populated stuff.

Now, whenever you export a file, Ruby - RSpec will show up as one of your choices. Cool, eh?

If you make improvements to this file, please let me know. I’d like to benefit from them as well. One of the things that would be cool is if I could create describe…do and it…do blocks from the IDE. That would probably require a combination of extensions and changes to the format.

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