Selenium Evolution

The story starts in 2004 at ThoughtWorks in Chicago, with Jason Huggins building the Core mode as "JavaScriptTestRunner" for the testing of an internal Time and Expenses application (Python, Plone). Automatic testing of any applications is core to ThoughtWork's style, given the Agile leanings of this consultancy. He has help from Paul Gross and Jie Tina Wang. For them, this was a day job.

Jason started demoing the test tool to various colleagues. Many were excited about its immediate and intuitive visual feedback, as well as its potential to grow as a reusable testing framework for other web applications.

Soon after in 2004 fellow ThoughtWorker Paul Hammant saw the demo, and started discussions about the open sourcing of Selenium, as well as defining a 'driven' mode of Selenium where you'd get to use Selenium over the wire from a language of your choice, that would get around the 'same origin policy'.   Another (then) colleague, Aslak Hellesoy, experimented with different ideas for the 'server' piece, including page rewriting to get around the same origin policy. Paul wrote the original server piece in Java, and Aslak and Obie Fernandez ported that the client driver to Ruby, setting the foundation for drivers in yet more languages.