Well, I try not to blog about work too much as you know. Doing so can go bad in so many ways. Maybe it’s gossip about the hotties, maybe it’s whining about a boss, or worse- complaining about the product. One of those things always does in a “company blogger”. In addition, the last thing I want to deal with is chasing down some goofball’s rant against our work product because his 18 year old cousin messed up a survey on MySpace or something. But I wanted to break my barely-there rule today because I found a kick ass plugin for firefox. Actually I didn’t find it, it was recommended to me on an email list I’m on. The plugin’s called Selenium-IDE. There’s a link here on openqa.org. Why do I care about a plugin? Well, normally I don’t- but a Project Manager at work announced to the company that we were having an internal contest to win an iPod. He didn’t write any real rules at all- which left it wide open for my group to, uhhh, test the limits of the survey tools, so to speak. Anyway, I was well in the lead when the PM did something horrible. He emailed the company again telling them about the contest. You see, it turns out that no one reads the PM’s emails. Well, they scan them, but not more than a paragraph or two. His original contest announcement wasn’t well written. He found out the lack of interest in the contest and then shattered my chances by sending out a spreadsheet basically giving the staff a heads-up that I was kicking their asses. Uh oh, so then I had competition coming after me. Then something bad happened. A woman on the fourth floor had a survey that was a bit out of control so I was asked to look in to it by other departments to make sure it was legit. This happens from time to time. Most are legit, but I’ve had a few people making weird surveys targeting weird markets. Long story that I don’t want to get in here (see paragraph 1). Anyway, this woman had 2500+ completes to my 390+ completes. But the DB and Ops guys said that 1900+ of them came from 1 ip. ONE ip! (actually 90% of the results were from two ips, neither were NAT’ed). Hey, I’m not insinuating that her boyfriend in the QA dept has access to load testing software, and is helping her . . . but I’ll just leave it at that. Oh I was mad then. I hadn’t been doing QA automated stuff and was reserving that technique should I need it- much like The Last Starfighter saves his last Death Blossom. Well kids, it was time for that. It was time for Selenium. I can bend the rules better than all of them! No one out-cheats me! I highly recommend testing it out after watching the video here. It’s pretty easy to record a bunch of clicks and/or actions and have the system repeat them. For QA purposes only of course. I’m a cheater, and I’m proud of it. I’d better win the ipod, or I’m going to close all of the other staff surveys and take my football home. The sad thing is that I actually found some real bugs that I’ll need to research. Uggh. If anyone wants one of my basic html files to import into Selenium, let me know and I’ll put them online. I didn’t put them up anywhere because I don’t want too much traffic hitting the work machines. Our submit buttons are weird though, so email me if you want more info.
