Selenium Testing: What It Is and Why You Need It

As the world of technology rapidly changes, so must the tools we use to stay ahead of the curve. Selenium is one of those tools. 

Using Selenium helps ensure that your software is working as it should be, automatically running tests and reporting any errors. Also, selenium automation testing is essential for any web developer or tester.

In this blog post, we'll discuss what Selenium is, why care, and how to get started with testing. Let's get started!

INDEX

What is Selenium Testing?

Selenium Testing Tools

The Benefits of Using Selenium

How to Execute a Test in Selenium

Conclusion

What is Selenium Testing?

Selenium test is a type of web application testing that automates the process of testing web applications. You can use this to test web applications on any platform, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

When it comes to writing Selenium test scripts, some developers may wonder if they can use multiple programming languages. The answer is yes! In fact, you can use any programming language that Selenium supports to write your test scripts. 

The most popular programming languages used for Selenium are Java and Python. However, other languages such as C#, Ruby, and JavaScript are also supported.

Selenium Testing Tools

Selenium isn't just a single tool, but it's a suite of tools covering different aspects of web application testing. These include:

• Selenium IDE. It's a record/playback tool that is used to author selenium tests without learning a test scripting language. It's implemented as a Firefox extension and allows recording, editing, and debugging tests.
• Selenese. This is the test domain-specific language used by Selenium. Tests written in this language are called selenese scripts.
• Selenium WebDriver. It is a tool for writing automated tests of websites. It aims to provide a friendly API that's easy to explore, which will help make your tests easier to read.
• Selenium Grid. It is used to distribute your test execution across so that you can execute your tests in parallel. This allows you to take advantage of more resources and finish your test suite faster.

The Benefits of Using Selenium

There are many benefits of test automation with Selenium. But here are some important ones:

1) Time-Saver

As a software developer, your time is valuable. Any tool that can save you time is worth considering, and Selenium is no exception.

With Selenium, you can automate repetitive tasks such as regression testing. This means you can spend less tedious manual testing and more time developing new features. 

2) Increased Efficiency

In addition, Selenium can also make you more efficient by helping you avoid human error. When you're doing something manually, there's always a risk of making a mistake. But when you use Selenium to automate a task, that risk is eliminated.

3) Improved Accuracy

In addition to being more efficient, using Selenium can also help improve the accuracy of your software development process. That's because Selenium scripts can be written to follow a set of predetermined rules or instructions. This means that they will always produce the same results, provided the input is the same. 

4) Reduced Costs

Another benefit of using Selenium is that it can help reduce the costs associated with software development. That's because it can help eliminate the need for manual testing, which can be costly in terms of both time and money.

In addition, Selenium scripts can be reused again and again, which further reduces costs. 

5) Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing Made Easy

Finally, one of the major benefits of using Selenium is that it makes cross-browser testing easy. With Selenium, you can write one script and run it on multiple browsers without making any code changes. This saves you effort in the long run. 

If you're searching for a tool to help automate, look no further. It's an open-source tool that offers numerous benefits, including increased efficiency, improved accuracy, reduced costs, and easy cross-browser compatibility testing—to name just a few.

How to Execute a Test in Selenium

Here's an example of a testing process:

1. You'll need to download and install the Selenium IDE plugin for your browser.
2. Once you've installed the plugin, you'll need to restart your browser.
3. Once you've restarted your browser, open the Selenium IDE plugin by going to Tools > Selenium IDE in the menu bar. 
4. In the Selenium IDE window that opens, click on the Record button in the toolbar. 
5. Now that recording is enabled navigate to the web page that you want to test in your browser.
6. Once you're on the page, perform the actions that you want to test. Selenium will record each of your actions as you perform them. 
7. Once you've performed all of the actions that you want to test, click on the Stop button in the toolbar. 

You can now playback your recorded actions by clicking on the Play button in the toolbar. Errors are also indicated with a red icon in the playback log. If an error occurs during playback, you can double-click on it to view more information about the error.

Conclusion

Selenium automation testing is a key part of software quality assurance. It helps you verify that your application works as expected under different conditions.

Above all, Selenium is an open-source toolset. This makes it widely available and customizable to meet your specific project needs.