SELENIUM OVERVIEW

 

Other trending automation testing tools

A series of automation testing tools are available in market these days which are equipped to give you best results and reports for your tests. In competition with Selenium many tools are available like Quick Test Professional (QTP, an HP product), Test studio – Telerik, Renorex, Sikuli, Phantomjs and many more. Scope of this automation testing tools are not confined to just test your web application but it also give you the detailed test reports along with multiple test case execution parameters.

Selenium Introduction

Selenium is an open-source and portable automation testing tool to test web applications. As we discussed it has competence to work with multiple browsers and operating systems. Selenium is not just a single tool but a whole suit which help test engineer to test web application more efficiently and effectively with less time when compared with manual testing.

Let’s have a bird-eye view on different tools selenium is comprised with:

Tools	Description
Selenium IDE	Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a Firefox plugin which provide feature of record/playback tests for automating tests without learning scripting language. User just need to record actions which they need to test.
Selenium RC	Selenium RC (Remote Control) is the flagship to selenium. Selenium RC is a testing tool that which makes full power use of programming language such as Java, C#, Python, PHP, Ruby, and PERL to make UI test script against any HTTP website using any mainstream javaScript enabled browser which helps to create more complex tests.
Selenium WebDriver	Selenium WebDriver in scion to Selenium RC. It is used to test web applications and to verify whether it works according to the expected flow or not. It directly sends command to browser and retrieves results.
Selenium Grid	Selenium grid is a tool which is used to run test across different machines, operating systems and different browsers simultaneously which leads to minimum execution time. Selenium grid supports distributed test executions.

Advantages of Selenium

QTP (Quick Test Professional) and Selenium has been competitor of each other since beginning. These two tools are most used in market hence it makes sense comparing Selenium with QTP.

QTP	Selenium
QTP is a commercial tool by HP.	Selenium is an open-source tool.
Can only run tests on specific versions of browsers.	Compatible to execute scripts across different browser independent of browser versions.
Only works on Windows operating system	Operating system independent
Third party tools needed to support mobile devices	Supports mobile devices on its own
Can only execute parallel test with help of QC which is also a commercial tool.	Selenium Grid is available for parallel execution of tests.

Disadvantages of Selenium

Let us discuss some of the drawbacks of Selenium.

QTP	Selenium
QTP supports both web base as well as desktop applications.	Only supports web base applications
Easily understandable IDE. Consumes less time to automate application using QTP.	No IDE. Script for automation is written in Eclipse if using java.
Test report and result generation within the tool.	No test report generation facility.
Built-in object repositories.	No object repositories.
Easy implementation of parameterization.	User has to use their programming knowledge for parameterization.

What’s next?

Theoretical part for Selenium ends here. In next article we will have a closer look to one of the selenium tool; Selenium IDE. Hope it would be more exiting to start learning selenium practically.