Selenium

Selenium: Versatile Software Testing automation tool

Selenium is one of the most widely used open-source WebUI (User Interface) Automation Testing suite, originally developed in 2004. It has a portable framework which provides a playback tool for authoring functional tests without the need to learn a test scripting language. The testing tool provides a test domain-specific language to write test cases where the developer can use programming languages, including C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, Groovy.

It’s a suite, not just one tool

Intrinsically, Selenium it is not a single tool, instead it is a product suite consisting of:

-- Selenium WebDriver

-- Selenium RC (Remote Control)

-- Selenium IDE

--Selenium-Grid

The Selenium IDE is the simplest framework in the suite and is the easiest one to learn. It is a Firefox plugin that testers can install on their PCs. However, because of its simplicity, Selenium IDE should only be used as a prototyping tool. For creating more advanced test cases, testers might have to use either Selenium RC or WebDriver.

Selenium can be used to automate functional tests and can be integrated with automation test tools such as Maven, Jenkins and Docker to achieve continuous testing. It can also be integrated with tools such as TestNG and JUnit for managing test cases and generating reports. Selenium-Grid is a feature that allows you to run test cases in different machines across different platforms. The control of triggering the test cases is on the local machine, and when the test cases are triggered, they are automatically executed by the remote machine.

Salient features

-- Ensures transparency, agility and transparency across the cross-functional teams of SDLC process (developers, quality assurance, operations, clients and the management).

-- Avoids waste of tester’s time in writing test scripts for each platform to be tested as it follows the principle of writing one test script and runs on any platform.

-- Fosters delivery integration efforts by automating the test process.

-- Offers great visibility in cases of end-to-end applications testing.

-- Reduces turnaround time by facilitating testing teams to automatically run multiple test cases parallelly on multi-browser platforms. This reduces the turnaround time by ensuring extreme testing quality.

-- Allows integration with other tools and jars like ExtentReports, Sikuli and Appium that extend its own functionalities too.

Why testers prefer it

Testers prefer Selenium over any other tool due to its ease of use, availability and simplicity. With the introduction of Selenium RC, testers can now circumvent the restrictions imposed by Same Origin policy prohibits JavaScript code from accessing elements from a domain that is different from where it was launched. Besides that, Selenium also encourages testers to write a script in one programming language and run (re-use) the same test scripts on multiple browser platforms.

Selenium’s WebDriver is of late becoming standard for all browsers, which in turn will automatically support it. The interesting aspect of WebDriver is it leverages testers in testing UI modules, offers a large set of options to test, compare results and finally check if they are in accordance to the expected application behaviour.