Do you know what is Selenium?
Do you have any clue why it's used? If you want the answer to these two questions, then wait until you read the whole content of the blog because you will be happy you spent a worthy quantity of time getting an introduction to that which could be at the centre of your next project.
Automation testing is currently taking the world by storm & Selenium Certification is among the most sought after skills in the business.
What's Selenium?
Selenium is an open-source tool that's used for automating the evaluations carried out on internet browsers (Web programs are tested using any web browser).
We can neither examine any desktop (applications ) program nor test any mobile program using Selenium.
I can feel your pain. But do not worry, there are many tools for analysing applications and mobile applications such as IBM's RFT, HP's QPT, Appium, and many more. However, the focus of the blog is, analysing dynamic internet applications and Selenium is the best for that purpose.
What are the advantages of Selenium Testing?
Since Selenium is open-source, there's no licensing cost involved, which is a significant edge over other testing tools. Other motives behind Selenium's ever-increasing fame are:
We can use Selenium just to test web applications. We can't test desktop software or any other software
There's not any guaranteed service available for Selenium. We will need to leverage the available customer communities
It is not feasible to perform testing on pictures. We will need to incorporate Selenium using Sikuli for image-based testing there's not any native reporting facility. But we can defeat that issue by incorporating it with frameworks like TestNG or JUnit
Before going any further in this what is Selenium blog, you need to know the story behind how Selenium came into being what it is today. So, let us know the scenario from the below order:
Software testing is where it all boils down to. Today's world of technology is totally dominated by machines, and their behaviour is controlled by the software powering it. Will the machines act exactly as we want them to? Every time? Everywhere? The answer to these questions lies in application testing.
At the conclusion of the day, it's the software program's success rate that is going to control your business development. The identical thing can be said even for internet applications because most companies today are completely reliant online.
Take, for instance, an e-commerce company. Can it be Amazon or even E-Bay or even Flipkart, they depend on the customer traffic on their internet sites and traffic on their web-based mobile applications for business.
Envision, if something catastrophic occurs like the prices of a number of products being capped off at 10$, all due to a small bug in a "not so readily readable" part of the code. Then what could be achieved, and how do we prevent it the next moment?
By analysing the code before installation right? So, that is the need for software testing. However, what exactly is Selenium? Can it be a software testing tool?
Before I go any farther, let me clear out that, Software testing consists of two types: Manual Testing & Automation Testing. Selenium was founded as an automation testing tool to overcome the drawbacks/ limitations of Manual testing. So, in another section of this what is selenium blog, let us know the challenges with manual testing.
Challenges With Manual Testing
Manual testing usually means the (web) application is analysed manually by QA testers. Tests need to be performed manually in every environment, using another data collection and the success/ failure rate of every transaction ought to be recorded.
Look at the above-mentioned image of a poor chap, who manually verifies the transactions recorded. The challenges he's facing cause exhaustion, boredom, delay in labor, errors, and mistakes because of manual effort. This lead to the invention of Selenium (automation testing instrument ).
Automation testing beats manual testing every moment. Why? As it's quicker, demands less investment in human resources, it is not prone to mistakes, frequent execution of evaluations is potential, supports lights out the execution, supports regression testing, and functional testing.
Let us have a similar example to the one cited earlier. Suppose there's a login page and we must confirm if all of the login efforts are effective, then it will be really easy to compose a piece of code that will validate if all of the transaction/ login attempts are a success or not (automated test case execution).
Moreover, these tests could be configured in this way that they are tested in various environments and internet browsers. What else can be done? You can automate the creation of the result document, by scheduling it for a particular time during the day. Then you could also automate the creation of reports based on these outcomes and what not.
The key point is that automation testing makes a tester's job a whole lot easier. Check out the image below which shows a more relaxed environment where the exact same tester is functioning.
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