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A company I applied to had sent me a "test", which I had to decline, due to it not making a lot of sense: They asked me to use Selenium to test a Win desktop app GUI and produce bug reports in the table form. They claimed that they're using Selenium to test Win desktop applications in their company, but they wouldn't tell how.

I did some research, and my understanding is that Selenium works with web browsers only, as it's been specifically designed for this. How can it connect to Windows desktop app? I just don't see any way possible for this. I found a claim that some integrate it with another open source tool to do this, but this "test" was supposed to take 1 hour of my time and installing some other framework, configuring, integrating with Selenium, etc, etc definitely wouldn't fall into one hour time frame. I had heard from another company too, that they wanted me to use Selenium to automate non-browser stuff if they hired me... Still have no clue about this--is this even possible? -- or is it something simply wrong?

Alex Chen
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  • I don't think it's possible to test a windows desktop UI using Selenium. Selenium uses javascript to perform UI actions. Here's a link that discusses Windows UI test products. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1137448/selenium-is-to-web-ui-testing-as-is-to-windows-application-ui-testing – Richard Nov 27 '13 at 04:03
  • I agree: I thought it was actually a trick question, but they were serious about using Selenium for this. And this was C# application--didn't have access to its source either, it was fully black box. Selenium doesn't make any sense here. Thanks – Alex Chen Nov 27 '13 at 04:30
  • I am a little confused by that. I can only assume a few things: they may be expecting you to say "hang on, Selenium doesn't "do" Windows UI applications (WinForms, WPF etc)" or there is some tool that builds on top of Selenium that no one appears to know about (possible). – Arran Nov 27 '13 at 09:20
  • Arran, no they did SERIOUSLY MEAN to test Windows UI with Selenium. When I told them it's not possible, they declined my candidacy immediately. Perhaps, this is just a "clueless tech recruiter" case. – Alex Chen Dec 04 '13 at 16:38
  • Take a look at this thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1137448/selenium-is-to-web-ui-testing-as-is-to-windows-application-ui-testing – Noam Manos Mar 01 '14 at 06:40

2 Answers2

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You can't. Selenium can only automate web browsers, and even then, only certain browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and occasionally Safari). It interacts with them at a very deep level, very specific to the browser in question, in ways that don't apply to other Windows applications.

Ross Patterson
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  • I had another interview, where the technical lead told me that the successful candidate will automate their non-web stuff (things like a bunch of RESTful service endpoints talking to each other, etc), via Selenium. I'm always suspicious about technical competence of the interviewer themselves when these things are suggested, considering the latter case can be automated using some simple scripts without any existing "framework" and Selenium is really only meant to work with Javascript-executing browsers. Why use a car to sail across the lake, so to speak. – Alex Chen Dec 04 '13 at 17:03
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Selenium is meant for GUI tests of web applications and nothing else. But you can include Sikuli in webdriver code and can test the any of the applications either desktop or web applications, since it uses Image recognition.

else if you want to test the desktop application using Selenium thne u need to import Autoit and can test those as well

Shaik
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