#selenium testing experts

Automated testing has come to the rescue of QA professionals jousting with the challenges of manual testing. In the Agile and DevOps driven software application development process, automated testing has undoubtedly shortened the time to delivery and reduced costs. However, automated testing requires the right selection of automation testing tools. Among the available tools, Selenium is placed right at the top of the technology stack. It is widely used to test web applications.

Why Selenium?

As an open-source testing framework, Selenium supports cross-browser testing of web applications and ensures the product to be market ready. Leveraged both by developers and testers, Selenium testing can be carried out by QA professionals without having a thorough knowledge of the scripting language. Migrating to Selenium testing services can give business outcomes like reduced testing effort, cost effectiveness, speed, platform compatibility, and much more. It has a default test language called ‘Selenese’, which can be used to write test scripts automatically. Moreover, the Selenium test suite comprises several tools such as WebDriver, Remote Control, IDE, and Grid, with each having a distinct functionality.

Selenium offers a slew of benefits over other automation tools. It allows Selenium experts to write test scripts in a particular programming language and use/reuse them across browsers. In fact, Selenium WebDriver has become a standard for browsers. Selenium testing entails testing user interfaces and comparing test results to validate whether they are in accordance with the expected outcomes or not. Its SENDKEYS method translates test scripts written in any language into the one understood by it.

Benefits businesses accrue through Selenium testing

·         Reduces cost: The Selenium tool is open-source and can be easily downloaded from its official site. It comes with a strong community-based development support.

·         Compatibility with browsers: Selenium can be leveraged to test any web application on multiple browsers like Chrome, Edge, IE, Firefox, Yandex, and Safari. The tool enables Selenium testing specialists to check that the web application works seamlessly on multiple browsers. Besides, by changing the scripting language, the tool can be customized to the exact testing requirements of a software application. Furthermore, Selenium WebDriver offers automated solution to the Selenium experts when they try cross-browser testing of any web application.

·         Testing across devices: Since web applications need to be responsive across device platforms for delivering a greater UX, they need to be tested on multiple devices. Selenium testing specialists can write automated test cases for iPhones, Android, Windows, and Blackberry, among others.

·         Speeds up time to delivery: Selenium allows testers to write platform-compatible test scripts, thus leaving them from writing separate scripts for each platform. This saves them from performing regression testing and quickens the time to delivery.

·         Allows CI and CD: The success of DevOps methodology depends on a seamless run of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery outcomes. Thus, by automating the test process, Selenium helps businesses to implement DevOps successfully.

·         Shortens turnarounds: An effective Selenium testing strategy helps QA teams to run multiple automated test cases across browsers or OS platforms in parallel. This, besides enhancing the quality of web applications, reduces the turnaround time to a great extent.

·         Compatible with frameworks and languages: Selenium tool can be easily integrated with a host of frameworks namely, Jenkins, TestNG, ANT, Maven, etc to compile the source code. In fact, its integration with Jenkins can enable CI and CD seamlessly.

·         Community support: The community-based support for Selenium ensures regular updates and upgrades. The support makes sure the tool remains glitch-free and meets the exacting testing standards and industry trends.

·         Simulation of keyboard and mouse cursor: Selenium allows you to simulate and automate several scenarios like keypress, mouse drag and drop, multiple item selection, etc. Such mimicking of real-life scenarios can facilitate QA testing and reduce turnarounds.

·         No specific training required: One of the main reasons for the adoption of Selenium is its short learning curve. The QA teams do not require prior knowledge of a particular language, for the tool supports a slew of programming languages. Just write the test script in a programming language you know and let the same be translated into a Selenium-understandable format. So, while using the tool, Selenium experts do not need to learn any new programming language, thus saving considerable time and effort.

Conclusion

Automated testing tools have become critical in ensuring the flawless delivery of software applications. Among many such tools, Selenium comes with myriad benefits that help businesses to automate QA testing and enhance the quality and delivery of web applications.

The White Paper explores different aspects that lead to market failures with Selenium implementations, and suggests solutions for the same.

Developing and executing test automation scripts have become an important part of the total quality assurance process. An automated test script does the job of manual testing, but with the built-in advantages of speed, coverage of a large test area, and repetition. Considering the benefits of test automation, writing test scripts that suit each and every development environment can be tricky and time consuming.  

This challenge can increase further while integrating the test scripts with some widely used programming languages. As a result, testers have found Selenium to be the perfect platform to undo all the niggling issues related to test automation. In other words, Selenium automation testing has become the new buzzword for the QA team.  

Let us first understand why Selenium is one of the most preferred platforms for Test Automation.  

It is an open source and free to use platform that is backed by a team of active developers.

It is highly portable. In other words, test scripts can be written for any platform (OS & browser).

There is no specific test script to be used for Selenium automation framework. For example, a tester can write the test script by using any of the programming languages such as Java, C#, Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc.

Selenium automation testing entails an easy integration of various processes, functions and their functionalities in a web application. This fulfils the criteria of CI in an Agile testing environment, where development and code testing takes place simultaneously.

It is highly resilient, flexible, and provides an excellent test automation platform for Web Application testing that is very much scalable.

Given the immense benefits of using a Selenium automation framework, the process of implementing the same is listed below.  

#Know the web application

While writing the test scripts for Selenium automation testing, the test team should focus on the browsers that are likely to be used to access and run the web application. The test strategy should be formulated to check if the browsers are compatible with the web application.  

#Get in sync with the tool

Among the many reasons justifying the use of a Selenium automation framework, quicker testing of web application arguably stays at the top. Hence, the team of testers should be updated with the entire range of Selenium features. The aim should be to minimize the learning curve and instead speed up the testing process.  

#Create the test environment

The following ways can be utilized to create a test environment.

Choose a browser like Chrome or Firefox

Choose a programming language and IDE to write the test script

Choose a GUI testing tool like Selenium WebDriver

Create the test scripts to check end to end flow of the application

#Divide testing tasks based on expertise

Writing test scripts for Selenium automation testing can be a complex exercise. In other words, given that each member of the testing team has a different level of expertise, it should be made use of while carrying out Selenium test automation. This can be done by assigning the task of writing the test script to someone who is adept at it. And follow it up by assigning the task of performing the actual test to another expert.  

#Identify good test data

To get the best test outcomes in carrying out Selenium test automation, selecting the right set of test data is crucial. The test data should be able to check each and every functionality and process of a web application. The task before the QA team is to retrieve the right test data and validate the same by running the test scripts.  

#Get reports

Selenium automation testing can generate a host of reports highlighting issues in the web application. These reports can be made use of by the testing team to figure out the next step of action and to ensure a quicker test outcome.  

Conclusion

Selenium automation testing can be used effectively by the QA team to achieve higher test coverage, meet the CI requirement as far as Agile is concerned, faster turnaround time, and ease of running it against any browser. These can be some key highlights of using Selenium. Ultimately, it is important to shorten the testing cycle, but by ensuring quality of the software/application.

Nowadays businesses needs more quicker time-to-market to their software products with no major expenses towards testing tools, at the same time they like make sure that the software bugs do not eat up their expenditures. They want affordable testing solutions which don’t compromise on quality to produce accelerated time-to-value. In the last ten years, the software testing industry has advanced from a small section of the application development lifecycle towards a market onto itself. A lot of industry standard testing tools at the moment are around to deal with various issues with the QA process, which range from simple unit testing to the end-to-end life-cycle management. Market evolution has resulted in increasing end-to-end charges for testing tools. However this is encouraging IT organizations to look for open source testing tools, that are usually more economical from being a total price of ownership point of view and still provide similar kind of functionality. Open source tools at the moment are an important aspect of the IT spectrum, and feature penetrated just about every facet of the software testing world. The day to day functions influencing the usage of the open source tools within the software testing industry. It may help a business cut down on investing in testing tools.