Just som random advice and best practices for using Selenium.


* Selenium tests can be rather volatile, failing intermittently.  This
  the case especially when using javascript, AJAX, iframes, frames or
  anything that makes page rendering timing dependent. To combat this
  use helper methods rather than the Selenium API directly. Then you
  will be able to easily insert waiting code in all tests as once by
  altering the helper methods. The waiting code should wait for things
  present on page or events, simple sleeps won't do.

  
* If tests start to fail intermittently try to fix them immediatly,
  otherwise stuff tends to go out of control, and then all your tests
  are for nothing.

  
* This is more of a general test advice. Since Selenium tests use the
  GUI they are often needs a fully installed system to work, pure
  unittests are hard to implement. If you try to follow the follwing
  rules you will be able to develop and run test smootly and also run
  them in parallell, which is nice since Selenium tests tend to be
  slow. 

  1, Tests should not use interfering data. If possible try to set up
  new users and prepare new buissiness data for each test case.

  2, It should be possible to run the same test case any number of
  times in a row without reinstalling the system (do not prepare the
  system in advance with data that is destroyed by the test case).

  3, Test cases should be runnable in parallell. This will make your
  test suite run faster, and it will also find bugs that you would not
  find otherwise. The real users will use your GUI in parallell too.

  Following those rules is not always possible, if there are only a
  few test that are breaking the them it can be good to put them in a
  special test suite to not interfere with the other tests.

  
* Try to use Xpath expressions as little as possible, of you change
  the html you will need to change the Xpath expressions. There is no
  error to add ids to the html elements purely to help with testing.

  
* If running the tests automatically on a GNU Linux system, the
  virtual X server xvfb can be used.

  
* If using nosetest, try the --processes flag and set
  --process-timeout to something high.