What is Selenium: Definition, How it Works, and Why You Need it?
Testing a web application may consume a huge amount of time to make sure if it is fully functional. Before the advent of selenium, manual testers had to strive for hours in order to enact and re-enact hundreds of test case scenarios on all the browsers that are benchmarked. Based on the manual testing team size, the end-to-end system/application testing could take days or even weeks to get completed. But, with the advent of selenium testing, the web application can be automated and thus run test cases efficiently and at a much faster pace keeping in view the quality and deliverables of software testing.
Selenium testing tool has proved to reduce a huge amount of time and effort of testing activities thereby providing a more productive platform to testers and developers.
What is Selenium?
It is an open-source test automation tool that is exclusively used for testing web applications. Selenium test scripts can be written in popular programming languages such as C#, Python, Perl, PHP, NodeJS, Ruby. Java etc. Selenium testing also supports various operating systems and browsers. Test cycles can be delivered faster by testers by automating repeated test cases. CI/CD pipeline can also be integrated with selenium for a bug-free release deployment pipeline.
Selenium 4 is the latest version and uses WebDriver based implementation. Only a single selenium jar file is needed to run tests both on remote devices and locally. This jar file contains selenium server, selenium grid and W3C — standard WebDriver API.
How does Selenium testing work?
Following are seven simple steps that depict how selenium works:
1. Use a programming language to create tests: JavaScript can be used as it is best suited for selenium tool because it comes with lots of add-ons and tools. However, depending upon the project and team requirements, other programming languages that support selenium can also be used effectively.
2. Apply a cloud-based framework: Scaling and setting up a selenium grid is a tedious and time consuming task. Rather than spending huge amounts of money and time on setting up a selenium grid, a cloud-based solution can be used.
3. Test scenarios should be sufficiently covered: In today’s age of digital transformation, web applications are accessed on both mobile and desktop. Hence, it becomes important to make sure that the test scenario is sufficiently covered across the platform. This includes screen characteristics, location, context and other considerations
4. All the specific aspects need to be tested: Testing types such as API, Unit, Exploratory, Accessibility, Non-functional, functional etc., should be considered. Time blocks have been allocated inside the CI (Continuous Integration) and within the development cycle for visual validations, API, Accessibility, and Performance testing and also taking into consideration other relevant scenarios. Through this quality can be maximized and business risks can be mitigated.
5. Selenium tests are executed: In this step, all the necessary steps are taken to run the selenium tests and see how these tests perform.
6. Reporting needs to be applied: Tests and reports should be managed in an organized manner. When code is being changed every now and then in the DevOps environment, it becomes crucial to update and maintain reports systematically.
7. Defects should be fixed accordingly: From the data and insights gained through analytics and reporting, if there are any defects that have been found then it needs to be fixed.
The need for selenium testing:
It boosts the performance of agile development:
Right from the early stages of software development, QAs are involved to run a series of acceptance and unit tests on modules. On every iteration, integration tests are conducted to make sure that the coded modules that are separate, do not break when it is put together. Regression tests are required for every new iteration so that the previous working iteration is not broken. Proper tracking of test cases as well as code is essential so that all the iterations are properly documented. This continuous testing is much required to match with the iterative development of agile.
Conclusion
If you are looking forward to implementing Selenium testing for your specific project, then do get connected with a professionally renowned software testing services company that will provide you comprehensive testing roadmap in line with your specific testing requirements.
About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on software testing.