Episode 226: (REPLAY) The Croissants are Selenium w/ Jason Huggins

In 2004, a team of developers at ThoughtWorks was stuck on a maddening loop. A button would work in Firefox, then break in Internet Explorer. They'd fix it for IE, push it to production, and it would break in Firefox. The next week, the same cycle. They were regressing, not progressing. Jason Huggins, then a developer on that team, built a tool to stop the backsliding. That tool became Selenium. Fifteen years later, Huggins joined the hosts of AB Testing to talk about what his creation has become—and what it was never meant to be.

The Croissant Problem

Huggins agreed with the hosts' core critique: Selenium is often used badly. But he pushed back on the framing. The hosts had argued that Selenium is a tool that enables dysfunction—separate test teams writing fragile, selector-based automation that they spend all their time maintaining. Huggins's response was a metaphor: "It sounded like you were sitting in a cafe in England complaining about the croissants and saying, 'Gosh, I can't wait to get out of England, let's get to France and we'll never have to deal with croissants anymore.'" His point was that Selenium came out of the environment the hosts were advocating for—a developer team with no separate testers, building a tool to solve a specific cross-browser regression problem. "When you're following all those principles, Selenium came out of that environment," he said. T