Wiki hub for Selenium Introduction

Welcome to the selenium wiki!

What is Automation Testing?

Test automation has grown in popularity over the years because teams do not have the time or money to invest in large test teams to make sure that applications work as they are expected to. Developers also want to make sure that the code they have created works as they expect it to.

Developers use a multitude of different testing frameworks to test different aspects of the system. Selenium is one of the most well‐known testing frameworks in the world that is in use. It is an open source project that allows testers and developers alike to develop functional tests to drive the browser. It can be used to record workflows so that developers can prevent future regressions of code. Selenium can work on any browser that supports JavaScript since Selenium has been built using JavaScript.

Software applications today are written as web‐based applications to be run in an Internet browser. The effectiveness of testing these applications varies widely among companies and organizations. In an era of highly interactive and responsive software processes where many organizations are using some form of Agile methodology, test automation is frequently becoming a requirement for software projects. Test automation is often the answer. Test automation means using a software tool to run repeatable tests against the application to be tested. For regression testing this provides that responsiveness.

WHAT IS SELENIUM?

The Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is an open source record-and-playback tool for generating Selenium scripts, which is integrated with the Firefox web browser as an extension. It is a renovmed web-based UI test automation tool that extracts any kind of locator from the web page. The locators can be either attribute-based or structure-based, and include ID, name, link, XPath, CBS, and DOM. The IDE has the entire Selenium Core, which allows the users to record, playback, edit, and debug tests manually in a browser. The user actions in the web page can be recorded and exported in any of the most popular languages, such as Java, C++, Ruby, and Python.

Selenium Builder is an alternative open source tool for the Selenium IDE to record and playback web applications. It is an extension of the Firefox web browser, which is similar to the Selenium IDE, but, it has some unique features that the Selenium IDE doesn’t support. Selenium Builder is a standard tool from Sauce labs that runs tests on Sauce Cloud from the Selenium Bader interface itself.

• Selenium IDE’s record and playback abilities

• Selenium IDE functions

• Selenium IDE Data Driven tests

• Selenium IDE JavaScript functions

• Selenium Builder record and playback

• Selenium Builder Data Driven tests

• Selenium Builder on cloud

Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web app testing across many platforms. Selenium…runs in many browsers and operating systems. Can be controlled by many programming languages and testing frameworks.

• Create by developers at ThoughtWorks

• Released publically as an Open Source project on OpenQA

• Selenium is a test tool for web applications.

• Selenium tests run directly in a browser.

• Runs on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.

• Runs in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox.

• Enables Browser Compatibility Testing.

• Enables System Functional Testing.

How Selenium works:

1. Uses JavaScript and Iframes in the browser

2. Core runs the tests and interrogates the DOM

3. RC server and Core communicate via AJAX

4. Language hooks communicate with the RC server.

Advantages of SELENIUM

• Open source, Free software

• Easy Installation

• Easy Record and Play back

• Supports Multiple operating systems

• Supports Multiple Browser Testing

• Can convert scripts in to other languages (Java, C#, Python, Pearl etc…)

• Easy to learn

• Script once, Run on multiple browsers

Testing tool for browser‐based testing of web applications. It can be used both for functional, compatibility (it has extensive cross‐browser support) and regression testing.

DISADVANTAGES OF SELENIUM

The selenium IDE plays back recordings as JavaScript inside the browser. JavaScript inside the browser is subject to the follow restrictions:

JavaScript cannot read from or write to files on the client machine,

JavaScript cannot close a window if it did not open it,

JavaScript cannot access web pages hosted on another domain,

Selenium IDE is only available on the Firefox browser.

Selenium is the best open source tool for doing automation for web based application and it does not have any cost attached to it. The only cost is the effort which will go for designing and developing the script for the application.There are Huge Openings in selenium because companies are trying to migrate from QTP or commercial tools to Selenium – Open source tool.

There are a set of Selenium tools which when combined provides you the power to automate simple to complex web application.

Source: Mindmajix