In his role as official Sauce Ninja and as a prolific poster in the Selenium forums, Santi has helped more users solve locator issues than possibly anyone else in the world. He’s previously written a number of blog posts on ways to improve locator performance. As Sauce CEO John Dunham puts it, “If there was a foursquare mayorship for locators, Santi would have it for a lifetime.”

Drawing from this experience, he gave us these four reasons for using CSS Locators:

1. They’re faster
2. They’re more readable
3. CSS is jQuery’s locating strategy
4. No one else uses XPATH anyways!

I can’t speak for everyone, but Santi sure sold me on point number one when he showed off the performance metric script he wrote a script that tested the speed of XPath vs the speed of CSS Locators. There wasn’t much of a difference in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome, but with IE, the results were undeniable. Take a look:

To underscore this even further, he also recorded a video in Sauce OnDemand that uses one heck of a cute kitten to illustrate just how slow XPath can be. The cat’s paw movements represent the test clicking through the different locators. The first batch of clicks uses CSS Locators and completes in under 30 seconds. The second batch, the XPath one, continues on for another eight minutes. Eight minutes!

During the rest of the presentation, Santi dives into writing both basic and more advanced CSS Locators. He also spends some time talking about when you shouldn’t use CSS Locators (yes, there are a few cases where it is not the right tool for the job). To see the talk in its entirety, check out the recording below. And if you’re thinking of switching over from XPath, but unsure of how to go about it, check out the nifty tool Santi wrote called cssify. It does the handy work of translating your XPaths to CSS automatically.

Helpful links
View Santi’s Presentation Slides
Follow him on Twitter
Follow Sauce on Twitter
Join the San Francisco Selenium Meetup group!

Enjoy!

Many thanks to our friends at CoTweet for co-hosting and making this last meetup such a success! If you think your company might be interested in hosting a future meetup, please get in touch. Our next meetup will be in early May at Mozilla (we’re skipping April because of the Selenium Conference happening next week). Stay tuned for more details!

• Eric Allen, a developer at Sauce Labs, who spoke about the different ways you can (and should) use Selenium’s Proxy Server
• Dan Fabulich, Senior QA Engineer at Redfin, who shared a technique for using Selenium to automatically test files on a disk
• Lalitha Padubidri, Lead QA Engineer at Riverbed, who gave attendees a glimpse into the Python-based Selenium infrastructure that Riverbed has built out, and
• Alois Reitbauer, Technology Strategist at dynaTrace Software, who demonstrated how to integrate your Selenium tests with dynaTrace Ajax, a free tool that analyzes performance and functional problems.

In case you missed the event, check out the video below for the full presentations. And if you haven’t joined the SF Selenium Meetup group, well, get to it :) We meet once a month at different venues around the city to mingle, drink beer, eat pizza, and hear various presentations on Selenium. It’s not only a grand ol’ time, but it’s free. Next meetup is March 16 at Co-tweet. Details to come soon.

Seven brave people took to the stage and the resulting meetup was, as hoped for, memorable, entertaining, and enlightening (I, for one, never knew Selenium could be used so creatively for non-testing purposes!). In case you missed it, check out the video below to see how members of the growing Selenium community are taking advantage of the testing framework.

We’ve got another great year of meetups planned, so if you’re in the Bay Area, consider joining the San Francisco Selenium meetup group. We hold free monthly meetups in and around the city, and it’s a great chance to geek out with other Selenium enthusiasts :) Hope to see you at a meetup soon!

Check ‘em out!

How Salesforce Tests in the Cloud with Chris Chen

Selenium 2 API & Interactions with Eran Messeri

For this last meetup, we were particularly excited about our speaker since he’s the creator of Selenium and an original Saucier. Jason Huggins, co-founder of Sauce Labs, joined us at LinkedIn in what could only be described as a “QA session on steroids.” Watch the video below to hear Jason’s take on things, including the topic on everyone’s mind, Selenium 2.0.

Our next meetup is Sept. 29 at Trulia. Davis W. Frank, of Pivotal Labs, will discuss Jasmine + Selenium, so make sure to join #SFSE today!

In the hopes of learning how members were specifically using Selenium, and to foster informal conversations around this, we decided to have “Whiteboard Night,” where we invited #SFSE members to volunteer to share their Selenium testing structures, philosophies, best practices, etc. The setup was similar to a poster session, with different “whiteboarders” presenting 5-10 minute sessions simultaneously and then engaging in organic discussions with the “minglers” who circled the room.

With 70+ plus attendees and 10 great whiteboarders from companies such as Mozilla, Pivotal Labs, and PB Works (to name a few), the conversations that resulted were highly thought-provoking. Most whiteboarders shared their existing test structures, while others proposed new ideas to get feedback from the group. Even Sauce Labs made an impromptu whiteboard visit, with Developer Miki Tebeka sketching out our testing system.

The responses afterwards were widely enthusiastic, with one newcomer to the group writing on the meetup page: “Awesome event! Great to talk to folks working ‘in the trenches.’”

With the success of Whiteboard Night, we’d love to have more in the future. We just need a big enough space to make it happen. If you think your company would be interested in hosting Whiteboard Night, please let us know. (To note: Digg’s digs were perfect. Plenty of open room, multiple whiteboards, and a huge fridge to store our beer :-) Thanks, guys!).

If you haven’t joined the #SFSE meetup group, please do so, as it’s the best way to stay in the loop. Next meetup is August 24 at LinkedIn – details coming soon.

Below are some photos from Whiteboard Night. For more, check out our new Sauce Labs Flickr Page. We’ll hope to see YOU at the next one!

Hudson is an easy-to-use, open-source Continuous Integration (CI) server that supports distributed builds and multiple extensions, including those for Selenium. The first video below gives background on Hudson, the reasons for its development, and the features included. The second two videos walk you through using the Hudson Sauce OnDemand plugin, which makes the Hudson & Selenium integrations quicker and easier to utilize.

If you’d like to see this presentation in its entirety, check out our Sauce Labs YouTube channel. Thanks again to our friends at StumbleUpon for providing a great space for us to use for the event. To hear these talks in person, join our Selenium meetup group. We generally host meetups once a month around the Bay Area, featuring different Selenium topics and speakers, so join in the conversation!

Hudson Background:

Sauce OnDemand Plugin: