Selenium

Selenium and Automation Testing

Selenium Testing and What You Need to Know

Selenium is a widely used suite of automation testing tools to automate web browsers. Projects use it for automation and regression testing. It is a compelling application because it supports many programming languages, is compatible with several operating systems, and works with a variety of browsers.

Selenium is not the only tool in the marketplace that is present to meet automation testing needs. It is one of many, but it is more popular because more because it is open source and comes with much fewer costs. Actually, it comes with no monetary damages. One can access it and start using it as quickly as possible.

The Selenium Suite

The suite comprises the Selenium Web Driver, Selenium IDE, Selenium Grid, and used to have Selenium RC.

Pro’s and Cons of Using Selenium 

Pros:

Everyone appreciates this because it is open source, and people can experiment and practice without high costs. As noted above, it will support prominent languages, operating systems, and multiple browsers. Further, one can conduct parallel tests on a variety of browsers and different instances of one browser.

Cons:

Remember that Selenium is only for web applications and is not present for mobile apps right now. They don’t have a thriving support community while other automation testing suites. It isn’t effortless for everyone to get it going. 

Those who want to use Selenium should have some foundational knowledge of programming and some background. It doesn’t come with reporting facilities, and so companies and project leads use another tool like TestNG.

One can’t compare several images in the suite.

Let’s find out more about each component of the Selenium Suite.

Selenium IDE

The Selenium IDE is a critical component of the Selenium Suite. It is a simple Firefox and Chrome plugin tool that we utilize to conduct the test case process. It can collect and play the actions that a user takes with a browser. Send out the programming code in several languages.

What else can you do with the IDE?

  •  Create and edit test cases
  • Execute test suites
  • Debug and enhance test cases
  • Test cases can be exported to different PL
  • Enables learning of Selenium’s script syntax

What is not possible with IDE?

  • Dynamic web applications
  • Lack of support for programming logic
  • Data driven testing is not feasible
  • No compiled base of objects/elements

Still, remember that you don’t use Selenium IDE for everything, you use it in a limited manner.

Download it here.

Selenium RC

Selenium RC is deprecated because it required more work. Developers needed to have copies of Selenium Core and the copies of the web server on the same system. It had to be this way so that it would belong to the same domain via the same origin policy.

Selenium RC bypassed the issue above but it still posed issues such slow moving processes that people didn’t want to deal with over the long term.

WebDriver

The next component is WebDriver. What is Selenium WebDriver all about and what is its purpose?

Selenium WebDriver is as an user interface to form and deploy test cases, these cases are are implemented through element, object locators, WebDriver Methods.

Now, remember that is not an IDE but a programming interface.

It is an API.

There is a critical difference between IDE and WebDriver, one key difference is that it is fast. It works with browser without any second steps or processes. Selenium offers several element locator techniques allowing users to find web page elements.

One web driver per browser allowing Selenium Web Driver to communicate directly with the browser. If you are on a different device, you must use RC first, but if on a local machine you can use Web Driver. The process with a remote machine is that it goes from a Web Driver to RC to the browser.

When you write a test case, you must choose which browser to run the test case, then input the script via the running driver.

Download the webdrivers here

Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid facilitates parallel test cases on different environments via the hub and children. This means that you can run test scripts at the same time on different machines and with different languages as well. The hub and node connection ignites via jar files (selenium server standalone).

You feed instructions to the hub or the master and execute the scripts through the children nodes.

These are the components of the Selenium Testing, I will go over other aspects of the Selenium Suite and other components in the continuing part of this series.

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