The pros and cons of Selenium Automated Testing

Selenium is an open-source automated testing tool designed for cross-browser application testing. According to SeleniumHQ -  'Selenium automates browsers'. How we harness this power completely depends on our strategies. Selenium automates web browsers as well as the web-based administration tasks.  There is a high probability that Selenium will be a native component of most of the popular browsers in the near future.

Knowing about Selenium

The initial release of Selenium had four main components. It is referred to as SeleniumRC

-          Selenium Integrated Development Environment(IDE)

-          Selenium Remote Control - Selenium(RC)

-          Web Driver

-          Selenium Grid

Later, the component Selenium(RC) and WebDriver were merged to form Selenium 2, also known as Selenium WebDriver. Selenium RC has been officially deprecated.

Selenium IDE: It can be implemented as Firefox extension. It allows us to record, edit and debug tests.  It is a complete Integrated Development Environment for Selenium scripts. It is an ideal environment for Selenium tests with its autocomplete support, optional recording capability and editable test scripts.

Selenium WebDriver: It is the primary feature of Selenium2. It is the first cross platform testing framework which could control the web browser from the operating system level.  It is a simple and more concise Object Oriented programming interface. Selenium WebDriver was developed to provide enhanced support to dynamic webpages where elements and contents of a page change without reloading the page.  Here, tests need to be written in Java. The implementing classes used are listed as follows:

-          AndroidDriver

-          CromeDriverFirefoxDriver

-          InternetExplorerDriver

-          SafariDriver 

-          HtmlUnitDriver

-          EventFiringWebDriver

-          RemoteWebDriver

-          PhantomJSDriver

Selenium Grid: Selenium Grid was developed to minimize the testing execution time as much as possible. It captured browser screen shots and sent out Selenium commands to different machines simultaneously. It works on the hub-nodes concept.  The hub acting as the main source of Selenium, commands to each connected node.

Pros and Cons of Selenium Automated Testing

The advantages of using Selenium are as follows:

-          Low Cost Tool – Since it is an open source tool it can be easily downloaded and programmers can easily use the tools to automate the web application testing in any scripting language.

-          Browser Compatibility Testing : Applications can be easily tested across multiple web browsers

-          Supports multiple programming languages: The Selenium client languages can be easily imported into popular languages such as Net Beans, .net, Eclipse etc.

-          Multiple Testing Frameworks: It supports a variety of testing frameworks such as JUnit, PHPUnit and TestNg

-          Easy Integration with the Eco system: It can be integrated with various kinds of test suites such as Selenium Grid, Ometry, Saucelabs etc.

-          AJAX Support: It supports for ajax functionalities and helps to monitor changes in content without page reload.

-          Open for Enhancement: Since it is open source, developers are free to expand the Selenium functionalities for more complex testing.

-          Enables Comprehensive Testing: It can be used for Functional, Regression, Usability and UAT Testing.

-          Test Driven Development: It is mainly used in the Agile and Extreme Programming community areas.

The various disadvantages of Selenium Testing are as follows:

-          Testing Roadblocks: It may show erratic or unpredictable behavior after injection of Selenium code into HTML source files for testing.

-          Finding Locators: Common attributes like Names, IDs, XPATH, DOM need to be located using firebug.

-          Limited support from browsers: To run test scripts on multiple browsers, they need to be written on Selenium IDE with Selenium core. Otherwise, the testing can only be carried out on Mozilla. Data Driven Tests are not supported by this framework. 

-          Implementation difference may slow down the performance of certain methods.

Selenium is at the core of many browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks. Recently, HP has enhanced its Unified Functional Testing(HP UFT) Tool and released LeanFT(Lean Functional Tool) which integrates the open-source Selenium features with that of its UFT Tool features.

Conclusion:

High quality documents and guides are available for Selenium which makes its learning and practice easier. Selenium is by far the most advantageous automated testing tools in terms of cost and flexibility.