Why Selenium Testing Is Preferred By The Testing Community
Customers expect that the software or application used by them must function seamlessly. This is in addition to their expectations that the applications must have top notch GUI and robust features. In many cases, these expectations fall short of being fulfilled as businesses are bent upon churning out more number of apps/software to keep up with the competition. The race to be amongst the best can often force businesses to cut corners. The focus, therefore, is to hit the market with more number of applications instead of testing them rigorously. Such an approach can lead to situations where glitch ridden apps play havoc with customer experience.
To meet the challenges in application development, especially web applications from flooding the market, companies are forced to take a fresh look at software testing. And when it comes to testing, test automation scores over manual testing for considerations of speed, time, cost and quality. However, automated testing is not so simple, as it requires the right platform to write the scripts, run and maintain them.Furthermore, the test automation platform should incorporate the right processes, paradigms, guidelines and reporting mechanisms to optimize testing. Any shortcoming in the above mentioned criteria can lead to the test not running to its potential. Hence, there is need for a robust test automation platform that is flexible, effective, easy to use, and open source. The Selenium test automation tool meets the above criteria and has become one of the most sought after ones in the market.
What is Selenium?
It is an open source test automation tool that comes with a rich suite of IDEs. The tool is compatible with a number of browsers, platforms, and languages. It can be used to create scalable and distributed automated test scripts across environments. Selenium has robust features such as multi- threading, record and playback. For example, an automated test script can carry out Selenium testing by instructing a browser to visit a particular feature of a website.
The script can make the browser perform some tasks repeatedly such as filling up a form or clicking on an element amongst others. Selenium provides a robust platform to write and run test scripts, generate reports, validate the functionality of a website and reuse the scripts if necessary. Selenium comes in four versions wherein each of them, independently or together, can be used to develop test automation suites.
Selenium IDE – Used to record or write the test scripts.
Selenium Remote Control – Used to run the test scripts.
Selenium API or Web Driver – Used to test a web application and its features across browsers.
Selenium Grid: Used to test scripts across a multitude of operating systems.
So, what makes Selenium testing the most sought after testing approach when there are others in the market as well.
Why is Selenium testing so popular?
Open Source: This feature allows testers to download, share and modify the code free of cost. This makes it cost effective as well as efficient. Besides, there are a number of Selenium testing experts that modify or update the tool from time to time to further enhance its features.
Flexibility: The features of the tool can be scaled up or extended to meet the objectives of Selenium testing strategy. Also, it can be integrated with other open source tools and facilitates the use of IDEs like Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio etc. Moreover, the reusability feature of the tool allows Selenium testing experts to prevent rework and speed up testing.
Supports multiple platforms: Selenium testing specialists need not write separate test scripts to suit different operating systems. Instead, the tool allows the test scripts (written in any language) to be run on any platform, be it Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari, Linux, Mac or Opera.
Language compatibility: Selenium experts can use any of the programming languages to write the test script. The languages can be Ruby,.NET, Perl, C#, Java, PHP, Groovy, Python etc. Hence, Selenium testing specialists need not learn a new language to write the test script. This saves time, money and effort.
Robust reporting mechanism: Selenium testing services generate many reports on its dashboard. The same can be used by the testing team to understand the glitches and write better test scripts.