Selenium Automation Testing
Test automation takes away the manual effort in testing activities, helping testers achieve more test coverage with less stress.
Selenium is a convenient and portable software testing tool specifically used for testing web applications. It acts as an API (Application Program Interface) for browser automation. Selenium is the widely used free and open-source tool used for automation testing of web applications through various browsers and platforms.
Selenium is used for functional and regression testing of web applications. Selenium supports multiple programming and scripting languages like Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP and Python to code the logic behind the test scripts.
Selenium Software itself is not a single tool but a set of software, And each part of the software suite will serve the different testing needs of an organization. The following types of selenium:
- Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Selenium IDE is the simplest auto testing tool and the easiest to learn. The advantage of using this auto testing tool is that the tests recorded via the plugin can be exported in various programming languages such as: Java, Ruby, Python etc.
- Selenium Remote Control (RC)
Selenium RC merupakan alat pengujian web otomatis pertama yang memungkinkan para penggunanya untuk menggunakan bahasa pemrograman yang mereka sukai.
- WebDriver
WebDriver auto testing tool which is better than Selenium IDE and Selenium RC in many aspects. Webdriver itself applies a more modern and stable approach to automating the browser.
(1) Using a specific programming language in designing test cases.
(2) Testing applications rich in AJAX-based functionality.
(3) Run tests on HtmlUnit browser.
(4) Create customized test results.
- Selenium Grid
Selenium Grid is a tool that can run parallel tests (running multiple tests at once) on different machines and browsers at the same time. Selenium grid can be used simultaneously with Selenium RC
Features of Selenium
Below mentioned are the features of Selenium tool:
- There is no licensing cost for Selenium users, as it is an open-source testing tool.
- Selenium is a cross-platform tool that supports cross-browser testing.
Selenium users can perform tests on any operating system like Android, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Linux. - Selenium can be used across various browsers like Safari, Chrome, IE, Mozilla, and Opera.
- To generate the reports and manage the test cases Selenium can be integrated with other frameworks like JUnit, TestNG and NUnit.
Drawbacks of Selenium
There are few disadvantages of the Selenium automation testing tool.
They are:
- Using Selenium one can test only the web applications. It is not suitable to test desktop or mobile or any standalone applications.
- There is no consistent nominal and technical support from any team as it is an open-source tool.
- Tests of Selenium are unstable. If new versions of Selenium libraries are released to fix an issue then it may disturb or makes the earlier test unstable.
- Due to its low-level API, the Test maintenance in Selenium is a struggle. It doesn’t help or assist the developer to deal with the error capturing, page screenshots and element locators.
- Even though Selenium supports its users to run parallel tests on multiple machines, that set up needs quite a bit additional knowledge without which it takes too long time to run the tests.
- Using Selenium one cannot execute testing on images.
Reference :
https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/selenium-alternatives/
https://www.jagoanhosting.com/blog/apa-itu-selenium/
