When it comes to testing anything in a browser, Internet Explorer tends to have the reputation of being the black sheep of the browser family. Anyone with any experience of testing know that there is a greater chance of something being broken in Internet Explorer than any other browser. Let’s face it, IE doesn’t have a great track record. As software testers, we all remember the pain of having to support IE8, IE7, IE6.

I've recently been lucky enough to be involved with a new software development project from the very start. One of the advantages of being the first Test Engineer on the project was that I was able to help implement and set up test automation on the project from the very beginning. Frequently software development projects see test automation as an after-thought and try implement it later, when the software is already quite advanced.

It’s been a roller-coaster of a month since my last blog post. In the last four weeks I have successfully managed to change job and learn JavaScript! I started on JavaScript the same way as Python by completing the free codecademy course. If you test things and you want to learn basic programming you should definitely give it a try. Some initial observations made while learning JavaScript: The learning process was much faster than last time.

Eight months ago I started my selenium adventure by learning how to automate finding pictures of cute cats. I chose Python as my weapon of choice due to it being very easy to install, not requiring a server to run and not needing a heavy IDE for development. I have been writing automated UI tests both at home and at work. I found my automated tests not only saved me time carrying out tedious repetitive regression tasks, but also found a range of genuine bugs ranging from obscure to showstopper!

Blah blah automation. Blah blah Selenium. Apparently automated testing is what all the cool kids are doing these days. I’m not naive enough to believe that automated testing is some kind of magic spell that when cast the software will test itself and suddenly reveal the location of all the bugs. But, having experienced first hand the pain of long drawn out manual regression testing, if ANYTHING helps ease even a small amount of that pain - I want to know about it!