Career Scope in Selenium-The Future of Testing

Test automation is the use of software application or special software from the software that is being tested to control the test execution and the outcome comparison with predicted outcomes. Test automation over the past 10 years has gone through multiple facets of change. Selenium is the best software automation testing tool available for software testers these days.

Why Selenium?

Selenium is more flexible and expandable providing a result-driven approach. The scope of job opportunities in selenium testing will be available at all times for skilled and training professionals.

The testing automation developers will convert the written test cases into automation scripts. It requires adequate programming knowledge in languages like C, Perl, C#, and Java. With the advent of model-based testing, testers are expected to have excellent business opportunities.

The trend of test automation is exponentially changing, and selenium is making way for more functional the testing at the initial development stages. While working as test automation specialists, obstructions would occur in forms of exceptions, framework code errors, failures, etc. Parallel to this, the web is undergoing continuous changes to create and maintain the needs of automated testing.

Scope of Selenium in Automation Testing

Selenium is an open source tool supports all the browsers available currently. Selenium webdriver automation framework is crucial for web-based test automation. It is an extension to Java that provides property to platform independence. Selenium is the detector tool for both PC browser and mobile browser automation and is considered as a web standard supported by all browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and many more.

As far as automation testing is concerned, Selenium Automation Testing is leading in the marketplace as of now. Being Opensource software, people who are interested in Selenium can learn in a better way to find their place in leading organizations. Selenium has a wider scope and it future is as sharp as tools are emerging to make and supports Linux, Windows, and OSX. There are distinct selenium courses available in a professional manner to learn more clearly about Selenium web driver scripts and its frameworks. The future is with qualified test automation engineers. They need to understand more concepts and artificial intelligence as apart of programming tools and languages.

Switch your Career to Selenium Automation Tester taking the following things into Consideration

Jason Huggins, an engineer at ThoughtWorks, created Selenium in 2004 while working on a web application that needs constant testing. To control browser actions and increase the efficiency of repetitive testing, he invented a JavaScript program called “JavaScriptTestRunner.” The potential for this realized and made into open-source and renamed as Selenium Core.

On the whole, Selenium is a lot more than an individual tool that consists of software’s host, each of which caters to distinct testing needs of an organization. It consists of four elements:

• Selenium Remote Control (RC)
• Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
• Selenium Grid
• WebDriver

As of now, Selenium and WebDriver are merged into a single framework to form Selenium 1 and Selenium 2, now refers to Selenium RC.

To help assist as a professional through the Selenium professional, here are six essential things that are crucial to switch your career to Selenium.

1. Required Software Testing Skills 

Software Testing is indispensable to provide a quality product without any bug or issue.

The validation process of a computer program to ensure that it meets the specific requirement generates the target results while identifying bugs in the software product. 

Perfect Software Tester Require to Become a Software Tester

• Analytical skills help in dividing complicated software system into smaller units to gain an enhanced understanding and to generate test cases. A software tester will always have highly developed analytical skills.
• Testers will have to interact with developers when a bug has to be handled or to troubleshoot other issues. It requires a good idea of diplomacy and discreteness. Test cases, test strategies, bug reports, etc. which are known as testing artefacts generated by the software tester being natural and comprehend to read.
• A great and positive attitude is necessary to become a professional software tester. Taking task ownership and completing it without a whole lot of direct supervision.

The below mentioned Technical Skills are as vital in taking up testing as a career:

SQL Knowledge: For facilitating data validation, it is essential to process good database knowledge such as MySQL and Oracle. As Software systems are said to contain massive amounts of data in the background, it is true. SQL queries ranging from simple to complex can be utilized to verify if appropriate data stored in the specific backend database.

Basics of Linux Commands: A sound knowledge of Linux commands is essential for testers to their career success. It is mostly because of applications such as Web-services, Databases and application servers.

Experience in Automation Tool: In addition to excellent automation grasp, it is necessary to have significant hands-on experience.

Knowledge of Scripting Language: A perfect hold on scripting languages like C#, JavaScript and VBScript are essential for someone looking out for a testing job. While some companies also use Shell or Perl scripting and hence there is a considerable rise demand for testers in the same domain.

Test Management Tool: Test management tools and techniques are essential and a staple part of testing, and pertain to the management of testing artifacts. It is a well-known fact that the success of any software process is entirely contingent upon the appropriate test management techniques. A perfect example of this is the Testlink tool used to track test cases written by a team.

While having sound knowledge of the skills listed above, it is not mandatory to know all of them. But this is a ready reckoner of the universal skill set required for software testing for their testing career success.

2. Educational Background

Having an educational background in Computer Science is desirable for a software tester. A bachelor’s degree, an engineering degree or a master’s degree in Computer Science. Information Technology or Computer Science Engineering will be sufficient for someone to land a job as a Selenium Tester.

Anyone who is lacking a background in engineering or science or both can be made up by taking up a proper certification in Selenium that will equip a professional with the essential skill to work on the tool. It will also provide hands-on experience regarding a project that will be part of the certificate.

3. Payout

Software Tester’s Compensation varies from one company to another. The average salary range of a software tester in the US is between $45,993 and $74,935. In India, the average salary ranges between Rs 247,315 and Rs 449,111. Also, a software tester also gets bonuses, health insurance, gratuity and other perks.According to payscale.com the average salary for an automation engineer is Rs 465,163 in India and around $72,734 approximately per year in the USA. 

As of 2017, the average salary of professional Selenium is around $80,807 per year according to Indeed’s global job portal.

According to the recent report from Payscale.com, the average salary for an automation engineer is Rs 465,163 in India and around $72,734 approximately per year in the USA. 

Check Out Selenium Tutorials

4. Career Growth

Software Tester’s career progression especially a typical QA analyst varies from one company to other. It depends on the employee skill level and the previous experience.

Given below is a detailed infographic on how tester career will progress with time.

5. Career in Selenium Automation Testing

The market trends of test automation are continuously changing with Selenium seeing exponential growth in shorter time periods. Selenium makes it convenient for functional testing from development beginning. It is not yet achievable to several other enterprise products that mainly enable regression testing.

Selenium makes it convenient for clients to receive ROI much faster by reducing a number of cycles involve in testing. It is crucial to remember that, as an automation test engineer one should have sufficient domain knowledge on the particular application that they are automating. Engineers no longer are used to automation by visual observation of test steps.

Selenium is shooting up with massive demand among automation tools since companies are increasingly making use of web applications. It is a known fact that a lot of vendor tool providers are supporting Selenium technology and using it to automate web application testing. Integrating with Selenium helps clients with web application testing obtained by pulling the APIs.

The areas that see a bright future are shift left testing, continuous integrations, DevOps and Containerization. Test automation engineers and AQ enterprises can find highly exciting opportunities in the fields of Mobile testing, Big Data, and API testing.

6. Benefits of Selenium Tool

A bevy of test automation tools is relied upon by testing professionals to test web applications most efficiently. Few test automation tools need professionals to write test scripts using a particular programming language. Hence, testers are required to learn these languages to write test scripts.

Selenium is a web application testing tool can use as a GUI driving library. The users, therefore, have the option of choosing Selenium for wrapping test scripts in other test frameworks. It helps developers to integrate features of one framework to others with Selenium to deliver a more vibrant and flawless user experience.

Before switching to new technologies, testers are required to verify its compatibility with their existing ecosystem. Selenium integrates with Qmetry, Hudson, and other widely used tools. Therefore, testers can incorporate the testing tools with current solutions and suite of tools.

Frequency Asked Selenium Interview Questions

Bottom Line

In the present scenario, Selenium is the perfect option for automated website testing. It is continuously becoming popular with its use rising at a rapid pace as time goes on. It is the first choice of automation testers as well as companies for automating the web-based application testing for both GUI as well as the functionality.