Selenium: A Rapidly Growing Technology In The Testing Industry

When a software application is developed, it is very important to check it for any sort of bugs or errors before releasing it. Once the product reaches the testing phase, organizations usually consider automated testing to save the huge cost involved in manual testing. With the demand of highly interactive and responsive software apps, many organizations are adopting agile methodologies and test automations are becoming a necessity for software projects. Most software testing services use different tools to run repeatable tests and today, there are numerous commercial and open source tools that assist the development of test automation.

Today, in this piece of blog, I will discuss with you an interesting and most widely used open source testing tool – Selenium.

Understanding Selenium

It is a free, open source software, automation testing tool for web applications across various browsers and platforms. It has the support of large browser vendors who have taken the initiative to make Selenium a native part of their browser. It also forms the core technology in many other browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks. It is not a single tool, but a suite of four components that cater to different testing needs.

• Integrated Development Environment
• Remote control
• WebDriver
• Grid

 Let us discuss the above components in detail:

1. Selenium IDE: It is a Firefox add-on that is used for creating, recording and enhancing scripts. It has the capability to record your interactions with the browser and even play them back. The record scripts in a specific scripting language know as the Selenese. This makes it easy for the testers to provide commands to the browser. Commands to retrieve data from pages are also there and these commands can be moved easily and there is also an auto completion support to edit them. It is basically used to create exploratory testing scripts or bug reproduction scripts. Another most important thing is that it is very easy to learn.

2. Selenium RC: This is a testing tool that enables testers to write automated web apps UI tests in any software programming language using any JavaScript enabled browser. It is available in two parts, a server that automatically begins and kills browsers and acts as HTTP proxy for web requests. The other part is the client libraries for users to use the programming language that they prefer.

3. Selenium WebDriver: The WebDriver proves to be better than both IDE and RC in various aspects. It uses a more stable and modern approach in automating the browser’s actions. Unlike RC, it does not depend on JavaScript for automations and controls the browser by directly communicating with it.

4. Selenium Grid: This component allows the tester to run various tests in parallel from different remote machines at the same time. The prime features of this tool are that it enables multiple tests to run in multiple browsers and environments.  It uses the hub and nodes concept and this allows you to divide your test suite to run different tests at the same time. This improves the time taken to run your suite by using parallel processing.

Thus to conclude, I can suggest that testers who are willing to use automation testing can choose this tool based on their project requirements. It holds especially true for the IT industry and if you are a web app tester, than selenium can boost your career dramatically,