Selenium for Test Automation — Yay or Nay?

In this article, we’ll look at some of the aspects that led to the widespread adoption of Selenium as the de-facto standard for web automation. We’ll also check the scope for advancement and improvement in a Selenium-based test framework.

“Selenium automates browsers. That’s it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) be automated as well.”

As SeleniumHQ states above, the primary use of Selenium has been to automate Web Applications for Testing purposes, and it has been doing the same for a decade or longer. From Selenium RC and Selenium IDE, it has grown to a full-blown Web Automation library that supports multiple browsers and Platforms.

Selenium has been around for a long time, and it is, without a doubt, a great tool. It has been serving Automation Testing needs of testers worldwide for quite a long time.

Pros

1. Open Source/ No Licensing costs

Selenium has no upfront licensing costs or payments to be made for its use since its freely available. It is also an open source project which allows for extension and modification of the base framework for one’s personal or professional usage.

2. Language-independent

Devs or QA Analysts working on a particular language don’t have to learn a new language just to start automating their tests using Selenium. Selenium provides official Language bindings with popular languages such as C#, Java, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, and Python in addition to the unofficial language bindings available for other languages.

3. Third-party Integrations

Selenium does not restrict a QA’s choice of reporting tools, build systems or any other aspect of their development/testing stack. It integrates well with popular tools such as SauceLabs, Selenium-Grid, Extent, JUnit, and others.

4. Parallel Testing

Selenium supports parallel test executions by integrating with Selenium Grid which helps to considerably bring down the feedback time for test executions.

5. Cross Browser and Platform-independent

Selenium supports all popular web browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. and works on all currently available operating systems platforms such as Windows, Mac, and Linux.

6. Community Support

Selenium is backed by a vast community of developers and testers who actively contribute to the tool and documentation.

These reasons make Selenium a great choice for automation testers in enterprises around the world. However, as time flows and technology advances, we need to adapt and adopt newer tools and technologies to keep pace.

One of the advancements that we can’t ignore is the impact of Artificial Intelligence. AI is being heavily adopted in all of fields and software test automation is one such field that can gain from it. Modern test automation frameworks need to leverage their capabilities better.

Now, let’s look into some other reasons that urge us to look for a better alternative to Selenium.

Cons

1. High Initial Setup time and costs

It is true that Selenium is free and there are absolutely no licensing costs involved. However, when it comes to ROI and Initial Cost, we need to think about a couple of other factors.

• The setup and configuration of a Selenium-based test framework take considerable time. That adds up to indirect costs.
• For a team consisting of mostly manual testers, the members need to learn to programme or the company needs to hire a bunch of automation experts to automate using Selenium.

Proposed solution: Codeless test automation tools can help the manual testers step up to the automation game easily. Most of these tools come with zero initial setup time as well since they are hosted on the cloud.

2. Not an all-in-one solution — The requirement for 3rd party bindings

Selenium + TestNG/JUnit is not the complete, comprehensive solution to fully automate the testing of your web applications. You need different libraries(POI API, GSON, Extent Reports) to make it a complete solution for a testing framework. And managing multiple dependencies is difficult and extra maintenance work that everyone wants to avoid.

Proposed solution: A good dependency management tool such as Maven, Gradle or NPM can make this task easier. Ant is outdated now and I wouldn’t suggest it since there are better solutions.

3. The difficulty of managing local test infrastructure

Parallel testing is very much possible with Selenium Grid — however, it is not always feasible to set up and manage a local infrastructure (test machines) since the requirements for devices vary with projects.

Proposed solution: Using a cloud platform (IaaS) for the test environments would avoid the hassle.

4. Eventually becomes a parallel development solution

There’s a lot of complexity involved in bringing multiple things together to create an effective and highly functioning test automation ecosystem based on Selenium. It takes huge technical efforts and requires constant updates, improvements, and maintenance of the complete framework. Eventually, it becomes a parallel development project which small and medium-sized companies can not afford in the early stages.

Proposed solution: Use a ready-to-use solution that delegates the maintenance to an external team so that the QA can spend more time on actual issues or bugs.

5. Inability to integrate Continuous Testing/in-sprint automation

With its code-based approach and high dependence on the UI, it is difficult for Selenium-based projects to shift the testing more to the left, which is required for continuous testing.

Proposed solution: Frankly, I don’t have a solution for this issue with Selenium since the dependency on UI is a fundamental drawback and one of the ways to shift left would be to rely on API Tests from the beginning.

6. No participation from non-technical resources

In Continuous Delivery and DevOps, quality is everyone’s responsibility. But with the cryptic code-based approach, only programmers can participate in the test creation activities.

Proposed Solution: Use a framework or tool that provides highly readable tests (to be read as BDD or TDD) and encourages the collaboration of team members.

7. Lack of professional on-demand support for enterprise projects

Even though the Selenium community is pretty helpful, you can’t always rely on community support for large scale enterprise projects which demand utmost privacy and quick resolution time.

Proposed solution: Something similar to point 4.

8. Solving automation/maintenance challenges

There are no inbuilt solutions for specific tasks such as Flaky Tests due to dynamic UI, File handling, API Level tasks, OS-based popup handling, and Basic Authentication

Due to the heavy usage of AJAX and modern web development technologies, Test is not always very stable. Also, since the Test Scripts are code-based, Test Maintenance is a bit difficult.

Proposed Solution: Adding fallback logic that can handle these challenges with native Javascript code.

9. Limited capabilities

Having no built-in test management, test data management, or test reporting capabilities.

Proposed Solution: Integrate with a third party test management tool and third-party libraries for test data management and test reporting.

#testing #selenium

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Top 10 Automation Testing Tools: 2020 Edition

The demand for delivering quality software faster — or “Quality at Speed” — requires organizations to search for solutions in Agile, continuous integration (CI), and DevOps methodologies. Test automation is an essential part of these aspects. The latest World Quality Report 2018–2019 suggests that test automation is the biggest bottleneck to deliver “Quality at Speed,” as it is an enabler of successful Agile and DevOps adoption.

Test automation cannot be realized without good tools; as they determine how automation is performed and whether the benefits of automation can be delivered. Test automation tools is a crucial component in the DevOps toolchain. The current test automation trends have increased in applying artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to offer advanced capabilities for test optimization, intelligent test generation, execution, and reporting. It will be worthwhile to understand which tools are best poised to take advantage of these trends.****

#automation-testing #automation-testing-tools #testing #testing-tools #selenium #open-source #test-automation #automated-testing

What's New in Selenium 4?

The newly released Selenium 4 is creating a lot of buzz and the complete testing community is looking forward to exploring its updated features.

Selenium has gone through a tremendous evolution since its introduction and that’s the reason today it is the most popular and powerful automation testing tool. The newly released Selenium 4 is creating a lot of buzz and the complete testing community is looking forward to exploring its updated features.

Before we dive into Selenium 4, let’s have a brief introduction to its previous versions. Selenium 1 was declared as the free open source automation testing framework in the year 2004 consisting of selenium IDE, RC, and web driver. Whereas, the Selenium 2 released in 2011 consisted of the IDE, Web driver, and Grid. The RC server was merged with the web driver, as the web driver facilitated easy automation scripting for the browsers. Selenium 3 was officially released in 2016. One of the most noticeable changes in selenium 3 was the replacement of the selenium core with the web driver-backed option, the introduction of the gecko driver, and W3C web driver integration.

With the aim of executing much seamless, accurate and faster test automation, Selenium 4 was released on 24th April 2019. So let’s unleash all the major features of selenium 4 which sets it apart from the earlier versions delivering better test automation. There are a lot of exciting features in Selenium 4 across the complete suite i.e. Selenium IDE, Webdriver and Grid. In Selenium 4 though the Webdriver captures the spotlight, we will cover the updated features of selenium IDE and selenium grid. So first of all let’s define the different user groups for the Selenium suite.

Selenium is a suite of tools that caters to the various requirements of the project such as:

• Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) Supports Rapid test development. This record/run tool helps in preparing test cases. Selenium IDE is an easy-to-use tool from the Selenium Test Suite which is used for developing automated test cases for web applications.
• Selenium Webdriver provides flexible and seamless automation through a friendly and flexible API. It can perform automation in almost all programming languages.
• The grid helps in providing automation testing by distributing and running the test cases in multiple machines simultaneously.

Let us explore the features of Selenium 4 across the different Selenium Tools.

#selenium #automation testing #selenium automation #selenium automated testing #selenium test automation #selenium 4

An Intro to Build Automation Tools for Selenium Automation Testing

Being an automation tester, we do realize that in a release cycle, time is always of the essence! Selenium test automation helps to save us a considerable amount of time in our test cycles. However, it is pivotal to note the way through which you are executing your Selenium testing scripts. Which frameworks are you using? Are you doing it with an in-house infrastructure or with an online Selenium Grid? Are you making use of build automation tools or not?!

Build automation tools like Maven, Gradle and ANT provide you to accelerate the Selenium test automation even further. Not only do they help you manage build lifecycles, dependencies but they also allow you to perform parallel test execution. In this post, we are going to understand why every automation tester needs a build management tool for Selenium testing.

What Are Build Automation Tools?

Build automation tools allow us to orchestrate our project builds by automating the processes for handling Selenium dependencies, compiling source code to binary & then later packages the binary. All in order to run automation testing. Build automation tools have become pivotal for the software development & testing process. These tools help developers in completing day to day activities like.

• Downloading dependencies
• Generation of the source code and extracting documentation from it
• Compiling the source code
• Packaging the compiled source code
• Installing packaged code into a server, local or a central repository
• Running Tests

#selenium #automation #testing #build-automation-tools #selenium-automation-testing #lambda #test-cycles #coding

6 Popular Challenges In Automation Testing using Selenium

Selenium is one of the most popular automated testing frameworks, with a market share of about 26.4% in the software testing tools category. This open-source testing framework enables you to automate user actions on your software application under test.

Using this free testing framework, you can also verify & validate your software products across multiple browsers. Additionally, you can create Selenium test scripts using various programming languages such as C#, Java, Python, etc.

The Selenium automation software consists of a host of software tools to cater to an organization’s different quality engineering needs. These are:

1. Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
2. Selenium RC (Remote Control)
3. Selenium WebDriver
4. Selenium Grid

Even though Selenium is among the most preferable web-app testing frameworks, it is not completely flawless. This automation framework has its fair share of challenges that developers face while working with it. Let us discuss some of the most common challenges and how you can tackle each of them.

#selenium #selenium-webdriver #selenium-automation-testing #test-automation #software-testing-tools #deployment-challenges #software-quality-assurance #software-testing

How To Get Attribute Value In Selenium WebDriver

While you are automating your test cases with Selenium automation, here is how to start implementing Selenium getAttribute() method to get the best results.

Introduction

Testing a web page can be a gargantuan task, considering all the elements and variables that come together to make a page work. Selenium automation is a great way to overcome these challenges and automate everything you would manually do. For example, Selenium makes it so much easier to take a screenshot using Python instead of doing it manually every time you come across a website issue.

Similarly, there are multiple scenarios while writing automation test cases when we need to verify a specific attribute on the web page. To ease our execution, the method to getAttribute() in Selenium comes to the rescue. In this blog, we will understand what an attribute is and how we can handle web elements’ attributes using the Selenium getAttribute() method.

Let’s get to it, shall we?

#selenium #webdriver #selenium automation testing #selenium automation #selenium - web browser automation #selenium automated testing #get attribute