Selenium is the most popular tool used for website automation testing. It was developed in 2004. Selenium is a portable framework for web app testing that uses “Selenese”, the default test domain language, to write test scripts.
Initially, it was only used for website testing. But as time passed and the demand increased, the company released its versions for software application testing and many more. In the initial launch stage, Selenium was restricted to use with the Firefox browser only. But this also gets resolved with the new Selenium IDE.
There are plenty of automation testing frameworks and tools available in the market that are also good and provide similar testing results.
But Selenium always finds the path to be in the conversation when discussing automation testing for websites, why? It is free to use, it supports a huge range of web browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc., and many more. These are just a few of the benefits of using Selenium.
In this article, you will first see what is Selenium and its components, and then you will get to know what are the best 7 reasons that the QAs should use Selenium.
What is Selenium?
Selenium is an open-source framework used to test web applications and websites. Selenium can perform automation testing for various web applications for various browsers and working frameworks.
This framework is a prior choice in the testing field because it supports many programming languages such as Java, Python, JavaScript, C#, etc. Selenium permits the testing group to perform an iteration of the testing cycle in less time to mechanize the test cases, increasing testing productivity. These features of Selenium make the testing process bug-free and error-free.
You can leverage the true capability of Selenium testing using cloud-based platforms like LambdaTest. LambdaTest serves as an AI-driven platform for orchestrating and executing tests, empowering users to conduct both manual and automated assessments on web and mobile applications across a diverse landscape of 3000+ browser types, operating systems, and real device combinations.
Its Selenium Automation Grid empowers you to conduct comprehensive end-to-end automation tests on a secure, dependable, and scalable Selenium infrastructure. With this solution, you can automate cross-browser testing seamlessly using Selenium scripts across various browsers and operating systems.
This approach not only expands your test coverage but also significantly reduces your build times.
LambdaTest aids in evaluating the rendering performance of your web application across various browsers. Additionally, it allows you to automate cross-browser testing for web pages hosted locally by utilizing the LambdaTest Tunnel. Furthermore, you can run a single test across multiple browsers and operating system configurations concurrently.
Prerequisites for Running Selenium Tests: To embark on test automation with Selenium and TestNG, you must first install certain prerequisites. Here is a list of these prerequisites and guidance on how to access them:
- Install the latest Java programming environment. Java 11 is highly recommended due to its robust and feature-rich nature, which benefits your automation endeavors.
- Once Java is installed, you can proceed to work with the Selenium Client and its WebDriver bindings. You can easily download the latest versions directly from the Selenium website.
- Consider installing Maven, a sophisticated build management tool, to streamline your testing efforts. Maven comes preconfigured with the TestNG framework, making it an excellent choice for Selenium projects. You can quickly download and install Maven by following the instructions on the official Maven website.
- Sign up for a free LambdaTest account to access faster Selenium testing capabilities across a vast selection of over 3000 browsers, operating systems, and devices.
- Visit the LambdaTest automation dashboard to acquire essential credentials that will facilitate the authentication of your local test script execution on the LambdaTest cloud platform.
These prerequisites will lay the foundation for your Selenium automation testing journey and enable you to leverage the powerful features of LambdaTest for efficient cross-browser testing.
7 Reasons QAs Should Use Selenium
Below are the top 7 reasons why it is suggested to use Selenium for automation testing by the QA teams.
Open-Source
One of the reasons for the popularity of the Selenium is its open-source availability. You can use the Selenium framework without paying any cost. many such companies provide automation testing tools and frameworks.
But they are not in a financial position they can provide free of cost access to their tools. In this scene, Selenium comes into the limelight among the automation testing teams.
The user gets almost all the necessary features required for automation testing free in the Selenium package. This saves a lot of testing costs that can be used in some productive works of their organization.
Apart from this, there are very active members of the community who strive to help engineers, as well as developers, automate a wide array of features and functionalities of a web browser.
Since Selenium is an open-source framework for automation testing, it allows you to customize your code for better management and improve the functionality of predefined functions and classes.
Language and Framework Support
The multi-language support feature of Selenium makes this tool a very popular choice among the testing team. Whenever we want to choose an automation testing tool, the first question that pops into your mind is about language support.
Is that specific tool compatible with our known programming language or not? Selenium eliminates this kind of issue as you have to write a testing script in your own language, and the rest work will be done by the Selenium tool itself.
Selenium offers many language support to perform the automation testing process. The various programming languages Selenium supports are C#, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and Pearl.
The testing team can use any of their preferred programming language to write the test scripts and then convert them into Selenium compatible course. This helps a lot to save the time of writing test scripts. This way, our web developers have the flexibility to work with the language of their choice, which eliminates the need for training and retraining staff.
Reusability and Integrations
Selenium allows the testing team to write testing scripts once and reuse them. These test scripts can be used for automation testing on multiple browsers and operating systems.
One of the twists of using Selenium for automation testing is that Selenium is not an all-in-one package for automation testing. It needs some other frameworks to get integrated with it. And it is highly capable of it.
For example, if you want to manage the test cases and generate and view the testing reports, you must integrate Selenium with TestNG and JUnit. Another example is if you want to perform image-based automation testing, you must integrate Selenium with Sikuli. All these integration features can be easily done with Selenium.
Ease of Implementation
Using Selenium is very easy for the automation testing community. It is due to the simple and user-friendly interface of the Selenium tools. The user-friendly interface of these tools helps to watch your testing scripts running and analyze all the processes.
Also, the huge and active community of Selenium is always ready to help you if you get stuck at any point in implementing Selenium for your automation testing.
Parallel Test Execution
One of the main objectives of automation testing is to save time and effort and make the testing process more efficient and productive. Using the Selenium grid to perform automation testing allows you to run your tests parallelly.
You can run multiple tests simultaneously, which run parallel to save testing time. With cloud rates for cross-browser testing, you can test across hundreds of browsers in parallel using Selenium.
For instance, if you were to run a test case that takes 10 minutes to complete in parallel, it would only take 10 minutes to complete the task of testing a combination of 10 distinct browsers and devices. So, using the concept of parallel testing by using the selenium grid helps to test the browser on a large number of web browsers.
Multi-Browser and Multi-Operation Support
Since launching Selenium, it has continuously worked to bring the best user experience in every term. Initially, Selenium was only supported in the Firefox internet browser. This limited its audience.
But as the Selenium tools were much easier to use with multiple features, its demand increased rapidly. And the company also did not disappoint its users. With the passing of time, the Selenium community brought updates that supported various web browsers such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and many modern web browsers.
You must not write a script for every browser, as just one script is required for all browsers.
Also, there are many types of operating systems that the users use to perform automation testing. These are Windows, Linux, macOS, etc. Selenium also supports all these modern and popular operating systems that bring a seamless and friendly experience to the user.
Flexibility and Easy to Learn
Test management is one of the crucial and important steps in the whole testing life cycle process. With the use of tools like Selenium, it becomes much easier, more flexible, and easy to perform the testing process.
Some of the flexibility features of Selenum are regrouping and retracting test cases. These features allow the testing team to check their testing codes quickly, make any changes, remove duplicates, and perform many other tasks. These features make Selenium stand out in the group of many automation testing tools.
Selenium test scripts are not like writing a very complex algorithm. Writing a few modules to automate your website’s abilities is all it takes to write a Selenium script.
Apart from this, Selenium offers documentation to help developers and testers get started with Selenium automation testing. The expanding community of Selenium offers services and development support that are easily accessible through Google searches and help the new testers to learn easily.
Conclusion
After reading this article, you can conclude that using Selenium has a lot more advantages over other similar automation testing tools and frameworks. Apart from these 7 major reasons, there are more than suggestions as to why the QAs should use Selenium.
The various components of Selenium are Selenium IDE, Selenium WebDriver, Selenium RC, and Selenium Grid are free to use and open source.
This tool is the best automation testing tool as it is free to use, more flexible, and easier to learn, and all these features suggest why it is the most popular automation testing tool around the globe.
If you liked this topic, check out our article on different types of software test automation tools and their uses.
