With the availability of several automation tools on the web, everyone has switched to automation testing from manual testing. This has made software testing much easier to implement and has saved a lot of time from repetitive and tedious work. One such web application automation tool is Selenium.
What is Selenium?
Selenium is a web applications automation tool to carry out automation tests on different web browsers. The automation tests are performed live on your screen to check the working of the application. Let us deep dive into what are the benefits of using the Selenium IDE.
- Easy to use – Selenium is one of the simplest automation tools to use. Because of its easy user interface, it is ideal for beginners as well, thus makes learning easy. Moreover, the community of selenium is very large, thus you can take help anytime online.
- Language support – Not every person is comfortable with every language. There are varied programming languages to choose from and each person chooses according to their understanding and need. But this takes a huge toll on choosing an automation platform. This is because not every platform supports all the languages. This is not the case with Selenium. Selenium supports all the major languages like java, ruby, c#, JavaScript, Python, and Perl. With this comes a framework specifically designed for each language, thus easing the hassle of writing test scripts[add_promo]
- Open-source tool – One of the major advantages of Selenium is its availability. Selenium is an open-source tool available for free on the web. There are no upfront costs so just download it and start working. This makes it portable and also helpful to all the software engineers’ community by helping them automate web browsers and their functionalities.
- Supports various operating systems – Being an open-source tool Selenium is helpful in many ways. But, it is not only accessible to the masses but also supports the platform each one is using. Selenium can run across various Operating Systems like Windows, Linux, Mac OS, UNIX, etc. not only this, selenium is made to be compatible with every device and switch in between the tests too. You can create a test suite on Mac OS and can run it on Linux as well. This makes it easy for the developer to focus on the automation and not worry about platform availability.
- Support across browsers – Being a web automation tool Selenium does not limit itself to specific search engines. It can work across Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Edge, and Opera. Selenium believes in multi-browsers one script ideology. You can write a test script for one browser and It can run multiple browsers. This makes the work faster and so much easier. You can also run tests on multiple browsers simultaneously. This is the power of the Selenium.
- Advanced simulation – If you have ever worked on Selenium you will realize the simulation is an imitation of real-world working. The simulation shows how the mouse’s cursor will click on the website and shows how an entry would be made just like we do with a keyboard. It can also make a few complex simulations as well like drag & drop, multiple items selection, click and hold, drop-down menu, etc. Such great simulation of real-world working makes Selenium stand out from other automation tools. Let’s not forget it is an open-source tool, so we are getting such features for free.
- Flexibility – Selenium has an edge when choosing automation tools. This is because it’s at par flexibility. It can be used to group test cases, make the code look cleaner, and ultimately being helpful to test engineers to maintain the code. With this grouping, re-grouping helps the developers and tester to make quick changes to the code, makes sure there are no duplicates, and minimizes complications.
- Tests across devices – Selenium also supports testing on the mobile web application. And it is not just limited to Android or Blackberry or iPhone. It supports all three of them and this helps in cross-device testing.
- Hardware Usage – It cannot be said that Selenium acquires the least space in the system but when compared to its other competitors like SilkTest, QTP, or UFT it takes much less space in the system and thus does not overload the storage space. It is very hard to acquire less space despite its multiple functionalities involved.
- Easy to learn – To save time and effort manual testing was switched to automation testing. Yet, working on a new IDE is a bit difficult. This problem, however, is easily addressed by a large number of Selenium tutorials available online and offline.
- Record and Play – The Selenium IDE supports record and play functionality with the Mozilla Firefox browser. Using this you can record your interactions with the browser and play them as a test. This function of Selenium is truly helpful and gives it an edge.
- Reusability and Add-ons – As discussed, Selenium test cases are cross-browser compatible. This means the code can be reused for different web browsers. along with this to widen the scope of testing Selenium can be integrated with other platforms called the add-ons. These can be used to manage test cases like adding TestNG and Junit. For testing with cloud-grid LambdaTest can be added. Several more such add-ons are used to broaden software testing.
With all these reasons we can easily say that among the plethora of automation tools available in the market, Selenium is the best among the best.
