What Are The Basics Of Selenium Testing?

 

Over the past few years, selenium has been successful in proving to be one of the best automation tools that has been accepted by organizations across the globe. It is by far one of the best automation tools for testing web applications across various browsers. Multinational corporations such as Apple, Google, Amazon and other fortune 500 companies have already benefitted heavily by using selenium again and again for their projects.

Another strong point about selenium is it keeps on getting updated by its original contributors so that it can easily tackle and solve all the latest challenges of web application testing. The four pillars or components that truly empower selenium are selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment), selenium RC (Remote Control), selenium WebDriver and selenium GRID.

Following are the top seven factors that justify the popularity of selenium:

1. Open-source: It is an open-source tool, which means there is no cost involved and upon that it is easy to download and use.

2. User actions can be mimicked: real-world user actions like drag and drop selection, keypresses, taps, scrolling, checkboxes, button click can be automated by selenium.

3. Easy to implement: Selenium is considered to be a user-friendly tool, where custom extensions can be developed by users for their use as the code available is open-source.

4. Supports many languages: Selenium supports a range of popular languages such as JavaScript, Python, Java, Perl, Ruby, C# etc.

5. Supports almost all browsers and OS: selenium supports all the browsers such as Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Coming to operating systems, selenium supports macOS, Windows, Linux etc.

6. Code reusability factor: Scripts that are written for selenium are cross-browser compatible. On multiple browsers, same code can be run using respective browser binaries.

7. Supports many frameworks: Selenium supports many frameworks such as TestNG, Mocha, Jasmine, PYTest, Maven, NUnit etc. CI tools such as Circle CI, Jenkins, Gitlab, Travis CI can be easily integrated with selenium.