Selenium Builder (Se-builder) - For rapid creation of test cases.

There are quite a few good automation tools out there which allow record and play tests efficiently. While Selenium IDE, TestComplete, UTF are few of the popular options, I stumbled upon a neat tool: SeleniumBuilder (AKA Se-Builder).

Se-Builder installs as an Firefox Addon, which is similar to how Selenium IDE is installed, and is launched from the context menu.

When launched, the interface appears in a pop-up windows which contains three options: Open Script or Suite, Manage Plugins and Start Recording tests. The recording option provides simple and convenient interface to record the test steps (user actions). The similarity of Se-Builder and Selenium IDE ends when it comes to the way Se-Builder stores and exports the scripts. Se-Builder stores the recorded steps in JSON format and it also comes with its own JSON interpreter. By storing in JSON format the scripts can be exported to Python, Java and JS code, which according to the documentation, was the main intention of storing the steps in JSON. One interesting use case would be to record the steps using the Se-Builder IDE and then playback directly using the provided Interpreter (using the interpreter as a Java Library).


                                         

The export functionality is one of the main strong points of using this tool. One glance at the options provided under export menu tells you why. The one that was surprising was the export to Node.JS supported tools. This means we can record the scripts and then export the scripts to   Jasmine format that can be understood by Protractor and deploy them in a BDD environment. It also supports exporting to JUnit, TestNG, Ruby, Python, PHPUnit among the others.

Like every tool , there are some cons with this one as well. For Example: when exported to Protractor format, some of the steps such as waiting/checking for the element to appear do not get exported to proper JS script command, instead comment Pseudocode is present for the test developer to implement. Most of the elements are accessed by xpaths, which can result in expensive in execution time, elaborate and tedious to maintain.

In conclusion, if you want a tool to script or accumulate automated tests in a short time, consider Se-Builder to get you 80% through the effort of writing the steps. It would be easy to develop page objects and add them to the exported scripts to build a robust test suite.

Links:

• Se-Builder: http://seleniumbuilder.github.io/se-builder/
• Jasmine: http://jasmine.github.io/
• Protractor: https://angular.github.io/protractor/#/