Selenium Introduction

May 5, 2017, autoqa, 0

Selenium Introduction

What is Selenium?

Selenium is a suite of several automated testing tools which are designed to support web-based applications automation testing on a wide range of browsers (Firefox, chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari etc) and platforms ((Windows, Mac OS, Linux etc). Each tool of Selenium package is designed to support different testing and test environment requirements.

Different Selenium components:

• Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE): is a record and playback user action tool on Firefox browser (is distributed as a  Firefox  Plugin).
• Selenium Remote Control (RC): is a server that enables communication between browsers and test scripts. Selenium RC allows users to create test scripts in any programming language (Java, C#, Python etc) and supports executing test scripts on a  wide range of browsers and platforms. It is also called Selenium 1.
• Selenium Grid: Selenium Grid is used to distribute your test execution on multiple platforms and environments concurrently.
• Selenium WebDriver : is also a web-based testing tool that has various advantages over Selenium RC. WebDriver directly communicates with the web browser and uses the browser’s native compatibility to automate.

The combination of  Selenium RC and WebDriver is also known as Selenium 2. Selenium 3 encourages mobile testing. which is expected to be launched soon in the market.

• Testing types that can be supported by Selenium:

Selenium supports Functional Testing and Regression Testing.

Why do we use Selelium?

Most of companies or individual have the common questions when they want to use automation test: “What is the best tool? Is it expensive and easy to adapt?”

Selenium has some features which satisfy these question and is selected for automating web based applications.

• Selenium is free open source and has large communities which can help each other.
• It supports multiple programming languages (Java, C#, Ruby, Python, Pearl etc.)
• It has cross Browser compatibility (Firefox, chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari etc.) and  platform compatibility (Windows, Mac OS, Linux etc.)
• Supports distributed testing (API).

What are the limitations of Selenium?

• Selenium supports only web based applications testing, not for Mobile applications testing.
• Captcha and Bar code readers cannot be tested using Selenium
• Selenium does not have a generate report feature. Currently, we have to use a library called ExtentReport or third party tools like TestNG or Junit to generate a report.
• Users are expected to possess programming language knowledge.

Fundamental knowledge for using Selenium Basic Selenium Webdriver automation practice with C#