« Tired of slow functional tests?

If you are a good QA or just a good agile developer I’m sure you’re already testing your web applications with tools such as Selenium.(*)

If you’re seeking for continuous improvement I’m sure that you complained at least once on the speed of those testing and on the maintainability.

You might wanna then have a look on the results that the guys of Celerity have posted on their website, basically they migrated all their Watir functional tests wrapping htmlUnit instead of starting the browser through Watir.

First benchmarks are impressive:

ScenarioWatir (total)Celerity (total)Time reduction1316,97 s0,59 s99,81 %2278 s86 s69 %3128 s33 s74 %4185,00 s4,67 s97,48 %
If you are using Selenium rather than Watir don’t despair, Simon Stewart is working hard on webdriver, and if you switch to the htmlUnit driver your Selenium test you’ll have comparable improvements on the speed of your tests.

(*) many people might disagree with this sentence, if so have a look first the Simon Stewart presentation at GTAC 2007 and then let me know your thoughts.