Version Control for Selenium Itself

Question

My question is about best practice.

We are moving to Selenium and will be using Selenium, Maven, TestNG and GitHub, with a Windows environment. We will have about ten users, with more in the future.

GitHub is for the test case code and test data version control, but what about Selenium/Maven/TestNG itself?

How might we best ensure that all users are using the same version of Java, Selenium, TestNG, etc.?

Do we include the Selenium Maven, etc. jar files as well?

System patching is done with IBM BigFix, and one manager suggested that.

Is that viable, for maintaining the Selenium Suite?

Answer 1

This is what you use Maven for. Maven manages and downloads your dependencies. Suggest you try to always use the latest stable version of Maven and you should be set.

Example pom.xml:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>junit</groupId>
        <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
        <version>4.10</version>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
        <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
        <version>2.45.0</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

So no do not put the depended JAR's in source control, use a dependency manager like Maven. It can even make sure you cannot use different versions of Java with the maven-compiler-plugin.

Personally I would version the test-code with the application and not in a separate repository. Other else you will wind up with only tests for the latest version. You could run into trouble when you need to maintain patches for older version.