Now that we have installed Selenium IDE and understand what it is, we can think about working through our first tests. There are a few things that you need to consider when creating your first test. These rules apply to any form of test automation but need to be adhered to, especially when creating tests against a user interface:

These rules, like most rules, can be broken. However, breaking them can mean that you may run into issues later on, and when you have hundreds, or even thousands of tests, these small issues can mean that large parts of a test suite are failing.

With these rules in mind, let's create our first Selenium IDE test.

We will record our first test using Selenium IDE. To start recording the tests, we will need to start Mozilla Firefox. Once it has been loaded, you will need to start Selenium IDE. You will find it under the Tools drop-down menu in Mozilla Firefox or in the Web Developer drop-down menu. Once loaded, it will look like the next screenshot. Note that the record button is engaged when you first load the IDE.

To start recording your tests, let's do the following:

We have successfully recorded our first test and played it back. As we can see, Selenium IDE tried to apply the first rule of test automation by specifying the open command. It set the starting point of the test, in this case, /chapter1, and then it began stepping through the workflow that we want to record.

Once the actions have all been completed, you will see that all of the actions have a green background. This shows that they have completed successfully. On the left, you will see that it has completed one successful test, or run, within Selenium IDE. If you were to write a test that failed, the Failure label will have a 1 next to it.

In the last few steps, we were able to record a workflow that we would expect the user to perform. It will test that the relevant bit of functionality is there, such as buttons and links to work against. Unfortunately, we are not checking whether the other items on the page are there or if they are visible when they should be hidden. We will now work against the same page as before, but we shall make sure that different items are on the page.

There are two mechanisms for validating elements available on the application under test. The first is assert: this allows the test to check whether the element is on the page. If it is not available, then the test will stop on the step that failed. The second is verify: this allows the test to check if the element is on the page, but if it isn't, then the test will carry on execution. To add the assert or verify commands to the tests, we need to use the context menu that Selenium IDE adds to Firefox. All that one needs to do is right-click on the element if on Windows or Linux. If you have a Mac, then you will need to do the two-finger click to show the context menu.

When the context menu appears, it will look roughly like the following screenshot with the normal Firefox functions above it:

We will record the test and learn how to use/verify some commands as follows:

If you now run the test, you will see it has verified that what you are expecting to see on the page has appeared. Notice that the verify commands have a darker green color. This is to show that they are more important to the test than moving through the steps. The test has now checked that the text we required is on the page and that the button is there too.

What will happen if the verify command did not find what it was expecting? The IDE would have thrown an error stating what was expected was not there, but then carried on with the rest of the test. We can see an example of this in the following screenshot:

The test would not have carried on if it was using assert as the mechanism for validating that the elements and text were loaded with the page.

We have just seen that we can add asserts or verification to the page. Selenium IDE does not do this when recording, so it will always be a manual step. The assert command will stop the running tests, unlike the verify command in which the tests will continue running even after failure. In both the cases, Selenium IDE will log an error. Each of these have their own merits.

Some of the verify and assert methods are as follows: