Introduction to Selenium

What is Selenium

Selenium is an open source tool for automation testing of web based applications. It is highly flexible because its API has many options for locating UI elements and comparing expected test results against actual application behavior. Selenium is a user friendly tool as the test scripts can be written in any of the programming language of our choice i.e. Java,Ruby,Python,C# etc.

Need of Selenium

In recent economic crisis, software companies are planning for cost reduction and efficient
productivity. So, Test automation is a way of storing knowledge and increase productivity because it can run repeatable tests against the application to be tested with much higher execution speed. There are a number of commercial and open source tools available for doing Functional, Regression and Performance Testing like Selenium, SOAP UI, Open STA, Robotium, WebDriver, WebInject, Arbiter, Jmeter, Junit, Nunit, etc. Among these tools Selenium Testing Tool is considered as a portable software testing framework and one of the best and widely-used tools available in the current market for web applications at free of cost. The tests can be written as HTML tables or coded in a number of popular programming languages and can be run directly in most modern web browsers.

Advantages of Selenium:

1. It is a open source tool, so considered as the best tools available in the current market for web
applications at free of cost.
2. It supports all browsers like Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome etc.
3. It supports all operating systems like Windows, Linux, Mac etc.
4. It supports all programming languages like  JAVA, .NET, Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc.
5. It provides the option of using wide range of IDEs such as Eclipse, Netbeans, Visual Studio
etc depending on the choice of development language.
6. It can run multiple tests at a time.
7. Selenium Grid can be used to distribute tests across servers and run tests in parallel.
8. Selenium is mainly used for Regression Testing but can also be used in Functional and User Acceptance testing.
9. It can easily rerun tests on demand.

Disadvantages of Selenium:

1. Selenium does not support testing of desktop applications.
2. It does not support file uploads from local machine.
3. It cannot test client server applications.
4. It has tricky set up.

In short, Selenium is a open source automation tool which works on multiple Operating Systems, with multiple browsers, and in multiple languages. That's it. :-)