Help with Selenium Automation issues

Hi all. I manage a small QA team which (for better or worse) has outsourced our automation efforts. The automation is in Selenium but still seems to require significant manual intervention to keep the scripts running. My greatest frustration is that the offshore team seems incapable of creating scripts which can be scheduled to run automatically without human intervention. When pressed, here is the response I receive:

The major problem with automation of web pages by using Selenium is stability of running of the scripts. Selenium very often cannot find DOM element on the page, there is known problems with its parser or with its engine, nobody knows.
The most stable test run is on FF, on IE and Chrome are less stable. This requires to look during testing and if script execution hung, then re-run test case to continue from failed point.
This is problem of Selenium itsel and well known in Internet. There is too less options, all good and stable tools are very expensive like SilkTest, QTP and other, and sometimes are also not stable. However among all free qutomation testing tools, Selenium is the most supported by community and widelly used.

Sounds like b/s to me. Would be interested in hearing opinions/solutions.

tx.

Hi,
There is a difference with Selenenium IDE and Selenenium web driver.
With Selelenium IDE, there are some limits and it's true sometimes le test case has to be finished with manual intervention. But Selenium IDE it is stable. If not, it is because writers of script are bad and incompetent.
With Selenium Web driver, most of all actions can be automated but it is necessary to have more knowledge of programming.

Where is your outsourcing ?

HI Friend,

Since you have posted the question in IDE, let me give my suggestion on IDE.Selenium IDE is by far the best open source functional testing tool.It is a stable one.
Test cases written on it do not change.
Parsing by xpath can be done and there is no problem in that.
Script does not gets hung , its a rare scenario.Unless you know how the website behaves, it is difficult to write test cases in selenium.
Manual intervention is not required for scripts to run, the tester has to think logically when he writes test cases.

you can ask your team to be part of this forum, it will help them alot.They can post their difficulties and sort them out.

Hope this answers your question,
Sharath