Get up to speed on a new project by writing Selenium tests

Alright. So I've taken the task of maintaining and extending an ASP .Net MVC 2 project with a friend of mine. It's not too big, but there are some things working against us:

• Neither of us have done ASP .Net development before
• We had to set up a new database (this was actually the hardest part) 
• There are no tests for the project
• The javascript looks like our javascript back in the beginning of the Recordings project ... we've learned better since then.

Actually, let me emphasize that last point. I'm a big fan of automated testing, so much that I feel hesitant to modify code that isn't under test (excluding the simple stuff, of course). Especially on an unfamiliar code base. That's why one of the things we've been doing and really emphasizing on this project is automated UI tests with Selenium 2 WebDriver.

Writing tests using Selenium has helped us learn the functionality of the application as well as establish a good suite of tests for future modifications. And at the moment they are more useful than unit testing due to the difficulty of unit testing parts of the code.

In addition, we're making sure to keep our tests nice and clean using PageObjects and also making them reproducible when they mess with the database. Eventually we'll have these tests picked up by our CI server when it builds the project before deployment.

Of course, that doesn't mean we're going to go without unit testing the code. There are a couple static classes from the ASP .Net libraries that are mixed in with areas we'd like to test -- but using some questionable hacks we've been able to work those out. And after burying said hacks in another layer of abstraction, we can write nice clean unit tests like we all enjoy.

So: Now that we're on a new project things should pick up with this blog again. Recordings is live and complete, so there hasn't been much programming for a few weeks.

See you next time, though.