Writing a web application certainly is fun. Testing the application, on the other hand, usually is a time-consuming, but nevertheless necessary evil. As soon as the application grows above, let’s say, a handful of functionalities and screens, test automation becomes unavoidable.
One great open source software to create automated tests fast but also reliable is called Selenium. Selenium can be used for functional, regression and load testing of web applications. The great thing about Selenium is that the tests can be written in various programming languages, including the most popular ones like PHP, Java, Ruby and many others. Writing tests with Selenium is very straight forward, although, of course, the complexity depends on your web application and its functionality to test.
But the best thing about Selenium is its IDE, which is a Firefox Add-on that allows you to record a test while you browse the web application. After recording your session you can run it again or export the test code in your favourite language and do some reengineering of the given code if necessary. How cool is that?