Everything You Need to Know About Selenium Software Testing

Do you have any idea what Selenium software testing is all about? Do you know why it is used? If you are looking for the answer to these two questions, then you are certainly on the right page!

Selenium automation testing today is taking the world of technology by storm. Selenium certification is one of the most sought-after skills today in the industry.

So, What is Selenium?

Selenium mainly is a free (open-source) automated testing framework which is used to validate web applications across various platforms and browsers. One can use multiple programing languages such as C#, Python, Java etc to develop Selenium Test Scripts. The testing conducted using the Selenium testing tool is basically referred to as Selenium Testing.

Know that Selenium Software isn’t a single tool but a suite of software, where each piece caters to various Selenium QA testing requirements of an organization. Below are those set of tools:

• Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
• Selenium Remote Control (RC)
• WebDriver
• Selenium Grid

Advantages of Selenium Automation Testing

As Selenium is open-source, there isn’t any licensing cost which is involved. This is a major advantage in comparison to other testing tools. Other major reasons behind the ever growing popularity of Selenium are as follows:

• Tests can be conducted using any browser: Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome
• Test scripts can be written in any of these programming languages: Python, Ruby, .Net, Perl, C#, PHP and Java.
• Tests can be carried out in any of these OS: Linux, Mac or Windows
• It can be integrated with tools such as JUnit and TestNG for managing test cases and generating reports.
• It can be integrated with Docker, Jenkins and Maven to achieve Continuous Testing.

Why Automation Testing Over Manual Testing?

Automation testing is always preferred over manual testing. Why? Well, because it requires less investment in human resource, it is much faster, not prone to errors, supports lights out execution, frequent execution of tests is possible, supports regression testing and functional testing as well.

Now, let’s consider an example. Assume that there’s a login page and there’s a need to verify if all the login attempts are successful. This will make it extremely easy to write a piece of code which will validate if all the login attempts/transactions are a success or not (automated test case execution).

Furthermore, these tests can be configured in a way that they are tested in various web browsers and environments. What else? One can automate the generation of the result file, by scheduling it for a specific time during the day. They can also automate the generation of reports according to those results and much more. Isn’t it really beneficial?

The main point here is that automation testing makes the job of a tester a whole lot simpler!