WatiN or Selenium? [closed]

Question

I'm going to start coding some automated tests of our presentation soon. It seems that everyone recommends WatiN and Selenium. Which do you prefer for automated testing of ASP.NET web forms? Which of these products work better for you?

As a side note, I noticed that WatiN 2.0 has been in CTP since March 2008, is that something to be concerned about?

Answer 1

I recommend WebAii since that's what I've had any success with and when using it my gripes were few. I never tried Selenium and I don't remember using WaTiN much, at least not to the point where I could get it to succesfully work. I don't know of any framework that deals with Windows dialogs gracefully, although WebAii has an interface for implementing your own dialog handlers.

Answer 2

You will have to do both if you need to do IE and FF testing, but they are only going to work so well for presentation testing. They cant detect if one element is slightly off, just that the elements are present. I dont know of anything that can replace the human eye for UI / presentation testing, though you could do a few things to assist it (take screenshots of the pages at each step for users to review).

Answer 3

If you're looking to make a serious long-term investment in a framework that will continue to be improved and supported by the community, Selenium is probably your best bet. For example, I just came across this info on Matt Raible's blog:

As of Friday, Google has over 50 teams running over 51K tests per day on internal Selenium Farm. 96% of these tests are handled by Selenium RC and the Farm machines correctly. The other 4% are partly due to RC bugs, partly to test errors, but isolating the cause can be difficult. Selenium has been adopted as the primary technology for functional testing of web applications within Google. That's the good news.

I also went to one of the Selenium meetups recently and learned that Google is putting serious resources into improving Selenium and integrating it with WebDriver, which is an automated testing tool developed by Simon Stewart. One of the major advantages of WebDriver is that it controls the browser itself rather than running inside the browser as a Javascript application, which means that major stumbling blocks like the "same origin" problem will no longer be an issue.

Answer 4

If you have to access iframes, modal dialogs and cross domain iframes WatiN is a way to go. Selenium couldn't handle the iframes it was throwing commandtimeout exceptions. WatiN you could do lot more things especially if the website uses IE specific stuff like ShowModalDialog etc.. WatiN handles all of them very well. I could even do cross domain iframe access.

Answer 5

We've tested both and decided to go with WaTiN. As others have pointed out, Selenium does have some nice features not found in WaTiN, but we ran into issues getting Selenium working and once we did it was definitely slower when running tests than WaTiN. If I remember correctly, the setup issues we ran into stemmed from the fact that Selenium had a separate app to control the actual browser where WaTiN did everything in process.

Answer 6

I use Watin, but haven't used Selenium. I can say I got up and running quickly on Watin and have had few to no problems. I can't think of anything I have wanted to do that I couldn't figure out with it. HTH