BDD-testing using a UI driver (e.g. Selenium for a web-application)

Posted by jonathanconway on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by jonathanconway
Published on 2011-01-03T12:00:44Z Indexed on 2011/01/03 12:53 UTC
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TDD

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bdd

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web-testing

Can BDD (Behavior Driven Design) tests be implemented using a UI driver?

For example, given a web application, instead of:

Writing tests for the back-end, and then more tests in Javascript for the front-end

Should I:

Write the tests as Selenium macros, which simulate mouse-clicks, etc in the actual browser?

The advantages I see in doing it this way are:

The tests are written in one language, rather than several
They're focussed on the UI, which gets developers thinking outside-in
They run in the real execution environment (the browser), which allows us to
- Test different browsers
- Test different servers
- Get insight into real-world performance

Thoughts?

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