Updated March 14, 2023
What is Selenium Automation Testing?
Selenium is an Automation testing software, which is used to test web application systems. It encompasses five major components, namely, Selenium IDE, Selenium Webdriver, Selenium RC, Selenium Grid, and Selenium Client API. Selenium requires very less or no knowledge of programming language, and it is flexible for cross-browser testing as well. Due to these characteristics and it is one of the rarely available open-source application software for Automation Testing, Selenium is the widely used Tool in the industries.
Working of Selenium Automation Testing
Selenium is not one software tool. It mainly consists of several components or many software tools or a suite of software.
The components and usage of them are given below:
- Selenium IDE: It is used for running and writing the selenium tests in any programming language. In this, tests can be edited, recorded, and debugged. It was also known as a software recorder. It generally records the user action and then exports the script in any of the programming languages that can be executed later on, and changes to that script can be done manually.
- Selenium Remote Control (SRC): It is also known as Selenium 1. It is generally a server that accepts the browser command with the help of HTTP protocol. The selenium RC instance needs to be launched to test the functionality of web applications. It is not actively supported as selenium 2 is already in the market and used mainly.
- Selenium Grid: It allows the selenium remote control to scale up the test case suites. It helps in running the tests in parallel that can be run on different remote machines. Its main aim is to divide the test cases and run different tests at the same time on different machines. It improves the performance and time to run the test with parallel processing.
- Selenium Web Driver: It is also known as Selenium 2. It is the successor of Selenium 1 or selenium remote control. It is widely used by developers. Selenium web driver accepts the command with the help of API, which is also known as Client API. It has fewer calls than selenium 1 calls. It is mainly implemented to the browser driver that is used to send the command and retrieve the results as well.
Advantages
The advantages of using selenium automation testing tool are mentioned below:
- It is highly flexible and extensible. It provides many ways to test functionality through selenium.
- It supports many programming languages that benefit the programmers to write or edit the test scripts in language comfortably.
- It also supports various browsers for testing web applications.
- It is platform-independent, which means any script can run on any platform.
- It is always improving the features for testing the application.
- It saves a lot of time and effort.
- It helps in satisfying the requirement of the organization and the client as well.
Career Growth
Selenium is one of the future tools. It provides great opportunities to professionals and beginners as well. The programmers or tester that are experienced in selenium are earning a good salary and getting a lot of opportunities across the globe. It is the greatest method for performing QA testing. The programmer generally requires programming knowledge, testing skills, and skills to create the framework for testing the web application’s functionality.
Selenium Automation testing also requires skills for setup, creating test cases or suites, executing the test suites, and creating the report as well. The programmers with these types of skills are getting highly paid by the organization. Now, automation testing with the help of selenium is one of the key aspects of the project for the client and organization.
Learning of Selenium Tool
The selenium tool has less learning curve. If the programmer knows the object-oriented concepts and has good knowledge of any of the programming can easily work with Selenium. There is a great online support community available for helping out with issues while performing and writing the automation test scripts for the web application. Selenium is being learned and practiced by a lot of professionals, and they are implementing it to their live projects successfully to benefit their organization and client in all aspects.
The selenium can be learned from online videos, community forums, and official documentation available on the official site. It is being used by the top organizations to test their web applications. The organizations also provide online training to scale up their employee or other individual skills. The programmers who are new to start with the programming language can start with Selenium IDE that helps in understanding the language and creation of tests and executing those test cases as well.
Conclusion – Selenium Automation Testing
Selenium is known as the most popular tool used for doing the QA testing of web applications. It is continuously growing in the field of testing, and many organizations or individuals are adopting the selenium because of the wide range of its features for testing the web applications like flexibility, open-source, free of cost, and platform-independent. Selenium has a lot of advantages to work on, but there are some shortcomings as well. In selenium, a detailed report of test execution is very difficult to generate, and selenium cannot test the images at all. But selenium provides the flexibility of integrating with other tools to test the functionality. People are easily growing with selenium as a basic understanding of the tool is simple, and new features are getting added properly with documentation that helps in implementing the same without any issues.
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