On my current assignment at the Chamber of Commerce i came into contact with Selenium IDE. This is an extension for Firefox which gives me the ability to record everything i do on a website so that i can replay may complete set of actions. A very nice addition to this is the ability to export the recorded test to Java (or to an other supported language) as a JUnit test. There are of course some downsides to this system and that is that it sometimes has some problems handling pop-ups or Ajax calls (i explain some solutions on the Wiki, click here to see them).

But all in all i have to say it is a real time saver, even when you don't use it for regression testing but just for developing. For example, some applications require that you completely restart filling in forms before you can actually test certain functionality that you have changed, by recording the test you can at least fill in the forms faster then before.

I can really recommend it to you to just try it out, it will take only about 15 minutes to get the hang of it. Download the extension from here (does not start the download directly) and just try it out with a random website to just see how it works. It is nothing more then clicking a few buttons.

Here are some basic instructions:

1) Install the extension.
2) In Firefox select:
      Tools -> Selenium IDE
3) Now the IDE is opened and should look similar to the picture on the right.
4) In Firefox browse to www.google.com
5) Enter some search criteria and click on Google Search.
6) Now in the found result click on some link to go to that page.

Oke, now we are finished with recording, in the Selenium IDE click on the red round button on the right side of the screen, this will stop Selenium IDE from recording more commands. If you now open a new tab in Firefox and you press the play button (the green arrow pointing to the right) it will start the test again and the end result should be the same as what you did manually. As you can see, it is very simple to use. There are way more complex situations possible, for example storing values from the page in a variable and using them in forms again. Or handling Ajax calls so that you have a wait until the result is retrieved. Handling pop-ups or inserting delays.

The Selenium IDE only runs as a Firefox extension, but when you export the script to a different language (like Java) you can run the script in virtually any browser, so cross browser testing is also a lot easier.