How To Speed Up Selenium Test Cases Execution?

Bethany Wilson
3 min readJan 20, 2022

Selenium has proved to be a remarkable automation testing tool for web applications. Selenium testing is implemented to scale up the efficiency of selenium tests. But, in certain scenarios, automation scripts generally run slower than usual. In certain instances, a single test may take more than usual time to execute and thus make the testing process slower. But, there are certain approaches that can speed up selenium test execution.

In this article, you will get to know a few key ways that can speed up selenium test case execution.

Following are the five ways that can be used to speed up Selenium Test Cases Execution:

1. The usage of the right Web locators: For any test scenario, Web Locators in Selenium are considered to be the essential building blocks. If the interaction needs to be automated with any web element, First, a WebElement should be located using a suitable web locator and then appropriate action can be performed on the element.

Following are some of the widely used Web Locators in Selenium:

· LinkText

· Name

· CSS Selector

· XPath

· Partial LinkText

· TagName

· ClassName

Web locators are used appropriately in conjunction with the find_element method. For locating WebElements faster, ID is the fastest Web locator, since the Selenium WebDriver that contains the ID locator is unique for every element on the page.

2. Only a few Web locators can be used: Once the best-suited web locators have been identified to speed up the Selenium tests, the next step is to make sure that there are a minimum number of locators. The find_elements(By) or find_element(By) method can be used for locating the WebElements(s), which, in turn, performs access to the DOM tree.

If the number of accesses is more to the DOM tree, then the execution time of the Selenium Script will also be more. If only a few web locators are used, then it is considered to be one of the best Selenium web testing best practices.

3. Thread.sleep() should be avoided: A web application or website comprise content that can be dynamic or static in nature. For the purpose of dynamic loading of content on the web page, modern websites use XML and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript). Hence, on the page the WebElements might load at different intervals, thereby creating issues when performing operations on the elements that are not yet in the DOM.

The DOM state must be checked by monitoring the document.readyState status. When the document.readyState is complete, then loading of all the resources on the page can be done. Specific functionalities can be performed on the page, where WebElements are present.

4. The existing browser instance can be re-used: Annotations are provided to all those test automation frameworks that can be used with Selenium for speeding up the test development and execution. The execution of tests is facilitated by annotations with different input values. The right set of annotations can be used depending upon the test requirements through which the Selenium tests become even faster.

5. The usage of Explicit Waits: To all the Web Elements in the test script, Implicit Wait in Selenium is applied. But, there are specific issues with Implicit Wait as it cannot perform wait on conditions like Element is Selectable, Element is Clickable, Element is Visible etc.

On the contrary, Conditional wait can be performed by Explicit wait in Selenium on the WebElements that are present on the page. The combination of ExpectedConditions classes and WebDriverWait is used so that explicit wait can be performed on WebElements. Explicitwait runs on the code.

Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing selenium automation for your specific project, then do get connected with a premium software testing services company that is precisely in line with your project specific requirements.

About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on the leading market savvy technologies.

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Bethany Wilson

Hi, this is Bethany. I’m working as Senior Software QA Tester with TestingXperts.