Selenium is an amazing open-source web automation tool that’s most often used for automation across different browsers for web application and operating systems, supporting a considerable amount of programming languages. It is used to assure high-quality web applications – whether they are responsive, progressive, or standard. Testers use Selenium because it’s straightforward to build test scripts to validate functionality. It provides a single interface that enables you develop test scripts in programming languages such as Ruby, Java, NodeJS, PHP, Perl, Python, and C#, among others. There are various types of testing that can be done using Selenium. You can conduct smoke testing, sanity, testing, UI testing, regression testing, and more.
Selenium is a portable software testing platform for web applications. Learning Selenium is not very challenging and in order to have better knowledge and familiarity, one should focus four things: Java, Selenium Webdriver, TestNg and Frameworks to learn automation testing with Selenium. The tests may be written as HTML tables or written in a range of popular programming languages. Selenium is a tool that can’t be used to automate desktop applications testing as it can’t recognize the objects in desktop apps. It’s primarily aimed at conducting tests of web apps, using various browsers mentioned above.
Advantages of Using Selenium
The biggest advantage of using Selenium is that it is a feature rich test automation interface and is available for free. It continually evolves with newer features and methods that make web application testing easy to do. Besides it feature set, Selenium also supports a huge number of programming languages that can be used for scripting automation test scripts.
Challenges of Using Selenium
For all its advantages, Selenium still presents a number of challenges. Selenium does come with a recorder IDE, which allows one to record and playback test steps on a website. This method though is usable only for small sites having very limited functionality to test. The other way to use Selenium is through creating scripts using any supported programming language. This creates a dependency that the user needs to be conversant using any programming languages.
Selenium API interface does not readily work out of the box. It necessitates an automation framework to be made use of which will provide the supporting features required to manage an automation project like reading of scripts, organizing them, selecting them, viewing the reporting, scheduling the tests etc. Many organizations typically develop their own test automation frameworks for using Selenium, requiring considerable efforts and costs. Besides that, any typical automation with Selenium will require users to either integrate disparate components from the open-source community for specific purposes like logging, reporting, reading files etc. Selenium does not provide such capabilities. The other way is to manually develop all such required features, akin to reinventing the wheel. The market is flooded with external automation frameworks and supporting libraries which can be integrated with Selenium.
Another challenge is the maintenance aspect related to Selenium scripts. As applications evolve in complexity, requirements keep on getting updated. This change in requirements causes a lot of existing Selenium scripts to break as by design they are typically brittle. Organizations are forced to come up with various abstractions like Page Object Model (POM), data driven and keyword driven model, or hybrid models in order to reduce the maintenance time and efforts. Breakage of scripts and maintaining them have been reported as the biggest issue that plagues projects which have implemented Selenium across the world.
Selenium users also typically report that setting up a test environment for Selenium is not as easy as compared to some other testing tools like UFT, especially dealing with grid and parallel execution. Selenium does not give support for test management tasks similar to the tools like HP ALM. Selenium is good at web application testing, but it cannot be used for API, Database or mobile native application testing as it provides no support for them. This forces teams to rely on multiple, disparate tools to complete their testing coverage.
Is Fanatiqa a Better Choice Than Selenium?
Fanatiqa is indeed a better solution compared to using Selenium. Fanatiqa is a complete testing and test automation platform. It is a smart all-in-one testing tool that not only allows one to automate and execute test scripts, but it even designs test cases as well as creates test cases and test scripts, at the click of a button. It has been designed from the ground-up to make it easy to accomodate changes in application business requirements, and update all impacted test design, test cases and test scripts all at once, quickly and easily. Besides Fanatiqa provide a custom test execution cloud that makes it easy and painless to execute thousands of test cases in minutes without any additional setup.
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