Getting Involved with Selenium

About Selenium

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 in the forums, in the Selenium Developers section. We'll work with you to get you set up to contribute.

You can help by...

Answering questions in the forums

For anyone interested in helping

We get a lot of questions and we have a great community to help answer them. If you could register and log into the forums 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

For writers, designers, and programmers with Selenium experience

We have a lot of out-of-date information that needs to be tidied up on the site!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 https://svn.openqa.org/svn/selenium-core/selenium-website. To get it running, you'll want 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.)

Get involved by posting to the Selenium Developers section of the forums.

Writing documentation

For writers with Selenium experience

For the most part our documentation is held in source control, on the wiki, or generated as part of the build(s). The main documentation is in plain HTML 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.

You can also help with the documentation of Selenium Core, Selenium RemoteControl, Selenium IDE, and Selenium Grid. (See above for how to set up Maven and Jetty locally to try it out on your own computer.)

Bug reports and feature requests

For any Selenium user

If you ran into a problem with Selenium, feel free to file a bug report about it. See our support site. Similarly, if you have an idea for a feature you'd like to see in a future version, report that as well.

You may also want to check the forums to see if a similar question has been asked. In many cases the bug reports are the result of not being familiar with the way Selenium works, is installed or its limitations. 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 they need.

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 below.)

Contributing code to Selenium

For programmers with Selenium experience

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 section of the forums.

Shaping the vision for Selenium

For project managers, QA Engineers, designers, and programmers

How could we make Selenium better? What would increase its value to end users and help it be more accessible and practical? Contribute to the discussion on the forums.