What is Selenium? Introduction to Selenium Automation Testing
What is Selenium?
Selenium is a free (open source) automated testing suite for web applications across different browsers and platforms. It is quite similar to HP Quick Test Pro (QTP now UFT) only that Selenium focuses on automating web-based applications.
Why Selenium?
The current industry trends have shown that there is a mass movement towards automation testing. Hence a cluster of repetitive manual testing scenarios has raised a demand to bring in the practice of automating these manual scenarios.
We used selenium because:
- It’s an open-source
- It has a large user base and helping communities
- It has multi-browser and platform compatibility
- It has active repository developments
- It supports multiple language implementations
There are multiple Benefits of implementing Automation Test let’s take a look at them:
- Supports execution of repeated Test Cases
- Enables parallel execution
- Encourages unattended execution
- Improves accuracy thereby reducing human-generated errors
- Saves time and money
All of these benefits result in the following:
- High ROI
- Faster Go To market
First Glimpse at Selenium
Selenium is one of the most popular Automated Testing suites. It is designed in such a way to support and encourage Automation Testing of functional aspects of web-based applications and a wide range of browsers and platforms. Due to its existence in the open-source community, it has become one of the most accepted tools amongst the testing professionals.
Selenium supports a broad range of browsers, technologies, and platforms.
Selenium is not just a single tool but a suite of software’s.
It has four components.
- Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
- Selenium Remote Control (RC)
- Web Driver
- Selenium Grid
Brief Introduction To Selenium Versions
Selenium IDE
Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is the simplest framework in the Selenium suite and is the easiest one to learn. It is a Firefox plugin that you can install as easily as you can with other plugins. However, because of its simplicity, Selenium IDE should only be used as a prototyping tool.It is the simplest and easiest of all the tools within the Selenium Package. Its record and playback features make it exceptionally easy to learn with minimal acquaintances to any programming language.
Selenium Remote Control (Selenium RC)
Selenium RC is a tool written in Java to allow a user to construct test scripts for a web-based application in any programming language he/she chooses. Selenium RC came as a result to overcome the various disadvantages incurred by Selenium IDE
Selenium Grid
With selenium RC, the life of a tester has always been positive and favorable until the emerging trends raised a demand to execute the same or different test scripts on multiple platforms and browsers concurrently so as to achieve distributed test execution, testing under different environments and saving execution time remarkably. Thus, catering these requirements Selenium Grid was brought into the picture.
Selenium Web Driver
Web-driver is also a web-based testing tool with a subtle difference with Selenium RC. Since the tool was built on the fundamental where an isolated client was created for each of the web browsers; no JavaScript Heavy lifting was required. This led to a compatibility analysis between Selenium RC and Web-driver.
Web-driver is clean and purely an object-oriented framework. It utilizes the browser’s native compatibility to automation without using any peripheral entity. With the increasing demand, it has gained a large popularity.