Using Selenium for Automated Testing

Testing web applications is essential to ensuring a flawless user experience.   With constant changes being made to applications and websites, and the number of supported browsers always increasing, it’s essential to use QA testing tools to manage and test your web app.

Selenium is one of the most important QA testing tools.   Put simply, Selenium automates browsers — and what you do with that automation is completely up to you.   Selenium is typically used for automating web applications for testing purposes, but can automate web-based administration tasks as well.

It’s important to understand that Selenium is a set of different software tools, each of them with a different approach to supporting test automation.   These tools include Selenium WebDriver; Selenium Remote Control; Selenium IDE; and Selenium-Grid.   Most engineers working with Selenium focus on the one or two tools that meet the needs of their project best.   A lot of people get started with Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE).   This is a prototyping tool for building test scripts.   It features an easy-to-use interface for developing automated tests.   People who are not experienced with a programming language can use Selenium IDE to get familiar with Selenium commands, and to create simple tests quickly.

One great benefit of using Selenium is that the set of tools can be used in a highly flexible way, allowing many different options for locating UI elements and comparing expected test results against actual application behavior.   Another plus is that Selenium provides support for executing tests on multiple browser platforms.

While using Selenium generally makes life easier for developers, it can also be resource intensive to set up and maintain in-house — so the ideal test automation tool should be based on Selenium, but should take steps to avoid the pain of manual maintenance.

Maintaining Selenium can become costly without the right framework.   A framework-based approach helps to reduce the maintenance effort that is required to manage and maintain automation tools efficiently.   A framework can enable end-to-end testing that verifies that the integrated component works correctly as part of the overall system, and that the existing components of the system work as before.   Using a framework also allows for integration with continuous integration and test management tools to enable quality metrics.   In addition, using an automation framework oriented methodology ensures smooth regression testing without human intervention.   You can reduce your testing costs and free up your QA resources with automated regression testing services.

Selenium is here to stay, so developers should learn how to use it as quickly as they can.   Doing so will allow them to more effectively automate their mobile app testing.   Adding an automation framework methodology will help them manage and maintain automation tools efficiently.

To learn more about the benefits of using an automation framework to run Selenium, download our whitepaper here.

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