Getting Involved with Selenium

Selenium is certainly a team effort! There are several ways you can help out, whether you’re a programmer, designer, QA engineer, writer, project manager, or just willing to help. If you’re interested in helping, the best way to connect with us is at the Selenium Developers Group. We’ll work with you to get you set up to contribute.

You can help by...

Answering Questions in the User Group

We get a lot of questions and we have a great community to help answer them. If you could register and log into the user group to answer a question or two, that would be great! There are often some very basic questions that are easy to answer.

Updating our Website

We have a lot of out-of-date information that needs to be tidied up on the site! Help by writing documentation, producing helpful diagrams, re-skinning the website, or organizing content.

You can get started by using Subversion to check out our content at http://selenium.googlecode.com/svn/selenium-core/selenium-website. To get it running, you’ll need to install a recent version of Java (if you don’t have it already) and Apache Maven, which is used to build the website and run it in a web server called “Jetty” (Maven will download Jetty when it’s needed.) Once you have it installed, run mvn jetty:run to start up Maven and Jetty and you’ll have a website live on your computer at http://localhost:8080/. If you’re on Windows, you may want to make a batch script like this:

SET JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_02
SET PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files\apache-maven-2.0.9\bin
mvn jetty:run

and then save it to the selenium-website folder (Maven uses the pom.xml configuration file there to set everything up).

Feel free to post questions on the Selenium Developers Group.

Writing Documentation

For the most part, our documentation is held in source control for the main website. The main documentation is in plain text so use your favorite editor offline to edit the pages. The source for this main site is here and if you are familiar with Subversion you should be able to bring it down to your local system for offline editing.

Submitting Documentation “Bugs”

If you find an error in our documentation, either a “typo” or innaccurate information. Please let us know. You can submit these as a Jira ticket.

http://jira.openqa.org/browse/SEDOC

Bug Reports and Feature Requests

If you run into a problem with Selenium, feel free to file a bug report about it on JIRA, our Bug Tracker. Similarly, if you have an idea for a feature you’d like to see in a future version, report that as well.

Also, we would love help going through the bug reports and adding comments (which automatically get sent to the reporter) for cases where advice is all that is needed. When creating issues in JIRA, the following templates should be used:

Bug template:

Description
===========
...
Steps to reproduce
==================
...
Expected
========
...
Actual
======
...

Feature / change request template:

Description
===========
...
Reason
======
...
Benefits
========
...
Drawbacks
=========
...

Note

Although these templates help the clear structuring of an issue, please keep in mind that bugs have to be reproducible and feature / change requests have to be understandable!

If you’re a programmer and are skilled in the language in question, then dive in and see if you can fix the bug (see Contributing Code to Selenium).

Contributing Code to Selenium

Much of the magic behind Selenium is the hard work of programmers with backgrounds in Javascript, Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl, C#, HTML and other languages. If you haven’t already, you can download the source code from our Subversion repositories:

We encourage code patches and other contributions - get involved by posting to the Selenium Developers Group.

Note

Useful information for people willing to code for Selenium-RC can be found in the Developer’s Guide at OpenQA’s wiki.