Selenium to do automated smoke testing on an interval

Question

I've actually looked through Selenium questions on here and didn't find quite what I was looking for.

Basically I have about 10 "use cases" for smoke testing my site. Basic things such as, can a user log in, can they register etc..

I want to set this up on an interval such as every 10 minutes run these tests.

Is this possible with Selenium Remote Control? Does anyone have a link/tutorial they could point me towards. I'm fairly confident this is possible but I'm just not 100% sure how to get it all set up and running.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Yes this can be done with Selenium RC. I have some Selenium Tutorials on my site. I have set up a basic user experience monitor before using Selenium RC, C#/Nunit and Windows Scheduled tasks to start the job to check the speed of our web app through the day.

Since I recommend using Selenium RC you can use any language you want to write the test.

Answer 2

Take a look at New Relic's Synthetics product, which wraps Selenium and provides periodic runs with alerting.

Answer 3

Dending on what kind of environment you're working with you could use something like JUnit and an automated build system like hudson. This gives you all sorts of notification infrastructure when something goes wrong.

I have known people to run a script like this against both test and production systems (with a fixed user). In test environments you can discover programming mistakes, in production you can assess the up-ness of your system at a far more interesting level than pings or process watching.