Explain in detail about selenium automation testing

by Hruska William Best Software Testing Company In Canada

Automation testing has proved to be a phenomenal testing activity in the software development and software testing domain. Companies have benefitted greatly through the tactical implementation of test automation for their respective software projects, which in turn leads to higher efficiency and reduced time and efforts. The speed of execution and test coverage is increased through the test automation platform. Selenium has gained worldwide popularity for being one of the most efficient automation testing tools. In this article, you will get to know about selenium automation testing.

What is selenium?

It is an open-source automation testing tool that is used exclusively for testing web applications. It can easily interact with different browsers and platforms. It supports popular programming languages such as Ruby, Perl, C#, Java, Python etc. It also supports parallel testing capabilities and cross-browser support.

Selenium comes with a suite of tools known as the “Selenium tool suite” that actually helps in facilitating the automation testing process. Following are the tools:

1. Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment): Test cases are created faster using this tool. It has a record and playback model through which interactions are recorded in order to create test cases, which the user had with the web browser. Playing back these tests can take place any number of times. The benefit of using IDE is that recording of tests happens via the plugin and then can be exported in different programming languages such as Python, Ruby, Java, etc.

2. Selenium RC (Remote Control): The problem started with the “same-origin policy” where JavaScript code prohibits accessing web elements that are basically hosted on a different domain when compared to where the JavaScript was being launched. In order to tackle the “same-origin policy” issue, local copies had to be installed by testers of both the webserver and Selenium core (a JavaScript program) containing the web application that needs to be tested. This would in turn ensure the same domain would be used. Ultimately, these changes led to the creation of Selenium

RC.

An HTTP proxy server is involved to ‘trick’ the browser in order to believe that the web application and selenium core being tested belong to the same domain. This will, in turn, make RC a two- the component tool that is Selenium RC Server and Selenium RC Client (It is a library that contains the programming language code). RC Server communicates using POST HTTP / GET requests.

3. Selenium WebDriver: It is a cross-platform testing framework, through which the browser can be controlled from the OS level. In order to create and execute test cases, a programming interface is provided. Test cases are written in such a way that identification of web elements on web pages takes place and then on those specific elements, actions are performed.

Direct calls can be made to the browser using WebDriver. Each browser has its own WebDriver such as Chrome Driver, Firefox Driver, IE Driver, Safari Driver, Opera Driver, and HTM Unit Driver.

4. Selenium Grid: Execution of multiple test scripts can take place at the same time on multiple machines through the selenium grid. With the help of Hub-Node architecture, parallel execution is achieved. The role of Hub will be assumed by one machine and the others will be the nodes. The test scripts are controlled by Hub running on various browsers inside various operating systems.

Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing selenium testing for your specific project, then do get connected with a premium software testing services company that will provide you with a comprehensive testing roadmap in line with your project-specific requirements.