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Record & Playback vs Selenium
An outline of the pros and cons of commercial Record & Playback vs open source Selenium frameworks.
| Cost | Test Writers | Extensible | Success Stories | Quality
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Record & Playback | $$ | Anyone | Vendor limited | Worst practice | Low Selenium | Free | Developers | Unlimited | Industry standard | High
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Cost - The expensive licensing costs of commercial R&P prevents giving everyone in the organization access to the testing software. With Selenium, it's not a problem to use it on unlimited amounts of servers and have the entire organization able to use the software as there's no fee.
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Test writers - Selenium requires some level of programming ability to write tests well. In contrast, the commercial tools allow anyone who can point and click to create tests.
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Extensible - Success with commercial tooling is entirely dependent on the vendor. There's no freedom to modify the source or share it with others. Selenium has a vibrant open source community with a diverse array of frameworks that enable building upon the best practices of many companies instead of just one.
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Success stories - Commercial tooling is marketed and sold to non-developers who have teams that don't know how to program. In general it's regarded as a worst practice in the industry. Test driven development success stories are built around hiring competent developers who use industry standards to create robust, maintainable, and scalable test suites. This isn't possible with record and playback.
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Quality - The quality of R&P is severely limited in a number of ways. There's no code so it's impossible to check in the tests to revision control and perform proper code review using standard tools. The vendor constricts how and where the tests can be run. Test maintenance is difficult as there are no integrated development environments to help with refactoring. With Selenium, it's easy to check code into github, perform code reviews on pull requests, run the tests on any vendor supporting the standard protocol, and maintain the tests using any IDE.