Last week I spoke at php[tek] 2013 where I explained to people how to get started with Selenium IDE to record user interaction with the web interface, convert them to PHPUnit testcases and automatically execute them on multiple browsers on multiple platforms.

The feedback I got was awesome, you're all a great crowd! But on twitter I also received a bunch of questions regarding how to set up multiple platforms and why I used Windows in my presentation to deploy to.

So today I deceided it was time to write a full article on this subject.

Selenium is a tool that allows you to continuously test user interfaces of web applications. The most common usages for Selenium testing are the following:

In general we call these type of tests User Acceptance Tests or UAT and are all focused from the point of the end-user, the person using the web interface to accomplish a certain goal.

UAT have their own right to exist. Just like regular unit, performance and stress tests they have their own agenda and are adressing a particular part of your application that needs testing. All to prevent your customers/visitors from finding issues, bugs or just unfunctional pieces on your web application and loose their trust in your products or services.

Therefor it's always good to invest in the "visibile" part of your web application. Especially when using javascript, you want to ensure it always works as intended.

Selenium tests are in no way a replacement for regular unit tests. Their focus is on generated output of your web application within a browser. Unit tests are still necessary to ensure the logic of your application is not broken when making modifications or adding new functionality!

You can write your own Selenium tests by hand, but the easiest way is to use the