Way to Automation - Let’s brief with Selenium

 

In the software development industry, software testing or quality engineering is one of the most important roles. Testing is very important to identify the bugs and defects that are included in the product, before handing it over to the end users. So, the testing is needed from beginning to the end of the software development life cycle to make a more reliable product for the end users. Mainly software testing can be done in two ways as manual testing and automation testing. When comparing manual and automation testing there are limitations which are included in manual testing methods as below.

Limitations of Manual Testing

• Time consuming

• Requires tester all the time

• Limited scope

• High risk of error

• Manual creation of logs and repositories

• Not support to performance and batch testing

But when moving to automation testing it can reduce the most of the limitations as above mentioned with related to the manual testing. So there are several tools available today to do the automation testing. Among them Selenium is one of the best and most famous automation testing tools in the software industry. This article contains a brief discussion about the selenium automation tool.

Jason Huggins an engineer at thought Works, Chicago found the repetitive work of manual testing strenuous and monotonous. He developed a JavaScript program to automate the testing of a web application. The program was called JavaScript Test Runner. In 2004 it was renamed as Selenium and it was made as open source.

Simply in Selenium

Selenium is a powerful automated testing tool used to test web applications across various browsers. So selenium is open source, provides records, and consists of a set of software tools, which facilitate testing, support to many programming languages, primarily developed in JavaScript, browser independent and platform independent.   

The component/set of tools in the Selenium

• Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is one of the main components in the selenium suite. It is open source and supports record and play back testing tools. It is very easy to use and does the automation testing without any difficulty. In here written test cases can be exported using different programming languages like Ruby, Java, C#, etc. That is very useful for beginners to understand the automation process easily.

• Selenium RC

Selenium RC (Remote Control) is the main component in the selenium suite. That was the first tool of the selenium suite. RC supports multiple operating systems and multiple programming languages. That selenium RC is also called selenium 1. Mainly that RC contains selenium commands, selenium server and the browsers.

• Selenium WebDriver

Selenium web driver is the most important component in the selenium suite. Web driver was developed to overcome the limitations in selenium RC. So that selenium web driver directly communicates with selenium code and the web browsers. 

• Selenium Grid

That last important tool in the selenium suite. That supports parallel testing. So testers can execute the test scripts in different machines in parallel.

How does Selenium aid in Software Testing?

• Speed of execution

• Accurate results

• Lesser investment in human resources

• Time effective

• Cost effective

• Support retesting

• Easy to implement

• Easy to understand the simple commands

Get in touch with features of Selenium

As an automation testing tool selenium consists of some main features. Then let’s see what are those?

• Open source tool for web testing

Selenium is a tool that is open source and freely available. So that it can be easily and directly downloaded from the website. Hence without paying any cost ,can do the automation testing with the help of selenium tool.

• Multi Browser Compatibility

Selenium supports multiple browsers to proceed the testing. Mostly use web browsers as IE, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge. So that multi browser support is very helpful to test applications over several browsers and can do the testing in a better way.

• Multi OS Compatibility

Selenium supports multiple operating systems to automate the applications. That support with web browsers including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. So using selenium can do the testing in server operating systems.

• Multi Language support

When doing test automation using selenium, it compatible with several programming languages including  JavaScript, PHP, Java, Python, C#, Perl, Ruby, etc. So that selenium provides choice and freedom to automation engineers to select any support programming language to prepare the automation test scripts.

• Support Various Testing Types

This is the most important thing in selenium. Selenium tools can be used for different types of tastings. Support testing types like Functional Testing, Regression Testing, Sanity Testing, Smoke Testing, Responsive Testing, Cross Browser Testing, UI testing (black box) and Integration Testing. So that is very helpful in enhancing the testing accuracy in several areas and overall product improvements.

• Support Multiple frameworks

Selenium support to integrate with existing frameworks to enhance the testing process. Most commonly and famous frameworks like Maven, Junit and TestNG. So testers can use that framework with selenium and can do the automation testing process quickly and easily.

•  Various ways to Identify the Web Elements

Selenium is mainly used for the web application testing process. So here identifying the web elements is the main thing. Selenium has several web element location identification methods such as id, name, className, tagName, linkText, partialLinkText, CSS selector, xpath etc.

 So as the above discussed selenium is a more powerful automation tool today to do the test automation in a very convenient way.