The Best Tool for Automation: Why Selenium?

The use of agile procedures speeds up software development overall while cutting down on time-to-delivery (TTD), time-to-market (TTM), and development costs. In order to guarantee effectiveness and quality in the testing process, demand for automated testing solutions has increased quickly. Among the numerous available automation testing options, Selenium is one of the most widely utilized web application testing tools. Understanding the Selenium tool, supported browsers and platforms for selenium, and the importance of using it are all subjects that will be covered in this article. We will discuss understanding the Selenium tool, supporting Selenium on many platforms and browsers, as well as the importance of using Selenium rather to alternative automated testing technologies, in this post. Let’s try to understand Selenium as a tool now.

Features Of Selenium:

A free and open-source framework for testing web applications is called Selenium. The Selenium framework employs “Selenese,” a built-in test domain language that helps testers, to write test scripts. This framework includes a wide range of software test automation tools, each with a special ability designed for a certain project or application. The following elements make up the Selenium test suite:

• Selenium WebDriver
• Selenium RC or Remote Control
• Selenium IDE
• Selenium-Grid

The use of selenium :

Selenium is a tool for automated testing that functions with a variety of web browsers. You can quickly automate browser testing across many browsers thanks to Selenium WebDriver, which supports a variety of browsers including Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Mozilla, and Internet Explorer. You may view the execution of live automated tests on your computer screen. If you want to win this game, let’s see what Selenium has to offer.

Features of Selenium-based Automated Testing are explained as follows :

Support for the language and framework:

Selenium supports JavaScript, C#, Java, Python, Perl, and Ruby. You may write your scripts in any language, and Selenium will convert them into Selenium-compatible code. Each language that Selenium supports includes a framework for creating Selenium test scripts.

Access to open source software:

As an open-source program, Selenium provides a cost-free automation framework that is readily accessible. Because Selenium is open source, you may edit the code to enhance the functionality of built-in methods and classes and to better manage your code. Selenium has established itself as the most dependable web automation technology since it makes it so easy to write test scripts to assess functionality.

Support for Different Browsers:

Selenium has established itself as the most dependable web automation technology since it’s so easy to write test scripts to assess functionality. The most popular browsers are Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera, according to Stat Counter. The Selenium script supports each and every one of the aforementioned browsers.

The testing community makes extensive use of the Selenium tool set. It can only automate web-based test cases; it is unable to test desktop applications.

Popular browsers that are supported includes:

• Firefox
• Chrome
• IE
• Safari
• Opera

Support for a Variety of Operating Systems:

Selenium test suites may be created on Windows or any other platform and then executed on Linux or Mac. As a result, developers and software testers may write test automation scripts without worrying about the platform they will use.

Popular operating systems that are supported includes:

• Linux/Unix
• Mac
• Windows

Another reason Selenium is so well-liked is because it can run on a variety of computer languages, including:

• Java
• Python
• JavaScript
• Ruby
• C#
• PHP

Integrations and Reusability:

Selenium test suites might be reused and executed on a variety of browsers and operating systems. Selenium is not a complete web automation testing solution. It is necessary to use third-party frameworks and add-ons to increase the testing’s reach. To achieve continuous testing, you must integrate Selenium with CI/CD tools like Docker, Maven, and Jenkins.

Transparency Market Research’s analysis projects that between 2017 and 2025, the global test automation market will expand at a robust 15.4 percent CAGR, growing from US$30.45 billion in 2016 to US$109.69 billion in 2025.

Testing professionals are encouraged by Selenium to create test scripts in a single programming language and execute (reuse) them on several browser systems. As WebDriver becomes a W3C standard for all browsers, developers will be able to design browsers that come pre-configured to support Selenium. This test automation tool is notable for using testers to test user interface modules, offering a vast array of testing possibilities, comparing the results, and then determining if they correspond to the intended application behavior.

Test scripts produced in a number of different languages are transformed into a Selenium-friendly format using the “SENDKEYS” technique in Selenium.

Although selenium provides many benefits, the following are some of the more significant ones:

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

By removing the need to create test scripts specifically for each platform that has to be tested, platform independence helps software testers save time. It is built on the idea of developing a single test script, therefore it works on any platform.

Time-to-market and time-to-delivery deadlines are frequently missed because manual testing is a time-consuming and dangerous operation. The total cost of the project rises as a result. Contrarily, Selenium reduces the necessity for testers to create test scripts for each platform. Regression testing is thereby avoided, saving time. This expedites testing and raises TTD.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery are the contemporary agile enablers of the software development process. By automating the whole test process, Selenium can serve as a catalyst for businesses efforts to effectively adopt Continuous Integration (CI) methods.

End-to-end testing visibility is ideal for testing end-to-end apps thanks to Selenium.

Testing teams may run several test cases simultaneously across various browser platforms thanks to the Selenium framework. This guarantees thorough testing and cuts down on turnaround time.

Appium, Sikuli, ExtentReports, and other jars are available and are just as well-known as Selenium with Java. In order to increase the tool’s functionality, testers can interface with these jars using the Selenium tool.

The integration of Selenium with “ExtentReports” may provide graphs and reports that can be used to give clients more information about the testing status.

You can test web apps that incorporate videos and graphics using Selenium with “Sikuli.”

On Android and iOS platforms, web apps may be tested using Selenium and Appium.