What is Selenium?
Selenium is one of the most popular automated testing tool. Selenium is a free (open source) automated testing suite for web applications across different browsers and platforms .Selenium supports web based applications testing on wide range of browsers and platforms. Since it is open source it has become one of the most accepted tools amongst the testing professionals.
Advantages of selenium
- it is free and open source
- Supports execution of repeated test cases
- It helps us in testing a large test matrix
- Enables parallel execution
- Unattended execution can be easily detected
- Reduces human generated errors & improves accuracy
- Selenium supports various languages that include Java, Perl, Python, C#, Ruby, Groovy, Java Script, and VB Script. etc.
- Selenium supports different operating systems like Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Unix etc.
- Selenium supports different browsers like Internet explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari etc.
Saves time and money
Disadvantages of selenium
- Selenium needs very much expertise resources.
- Selenium only supports web based application and does not support windows based application.
It is difficult to test Image based application. - Selenium script creation time is bit high.
- Selenium supports testing of only web based applications.
- Mobile applications cannot be tested using Selenium.
- Captcha and Bar code readers cannot be tested using Selenium.
- Reports can only be generated using third party tools like TestNG or Junit.
- As Selenium is a free tool, thus there is no ready vendor support though the user can find numerous helping communities.
- For the implementation of selenium the prior programming language knowledge is needed.
Components of selenium
Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) – Selenium IDE is a record and playback tool. It is distributed as a Firefox Plugin.
Selenium Remote Control (RC) – Selenium RC is a server that allows user to create test scripts in a desired programming language. It also allows executing test scripts within the large spectrum of browsers.
it is a client/server system that allows you to control web browsers locally or on other computers, using almost any programming language and testing framework.
Selenium WebDriver – WebDriver is a different tool altogether that has various advantages over Selenium RC. WebDriver directly communicates with the web browser and uses its native compatibility to automate.
Selenium Grid – Selenium Grid is used to distribute your test execution on multiple platforms and environments concurrently.
takes Selenium Remote Control to another level by running tests on many servers at the same time, cutting down on the time it takes to test multiple browsers or operating systems.