Selenium – Less Coding, More Testing
I would like to start with a small question. Can automation revamp your QA career..?
Being a QA, you must have an awareness about what is selenium and its forms. Automation testing tools such as selenium IDE, selenium RC, web driver and grid tools will grab the bugs over web applications.
Selenium is a functional testing tool for web applications. It usually works with different browsers. It provides multi-platform support and is a great tool for testing Ajax based web browser interfaces. I have tried selenium so many times and its outcome was really good. Meaning, I could find the unknown errors easily. Here what am suggesting is, try it once to get to know the beauty of selenium.
Selenium is implemented directly with the browser technology such as JavaScript Dhtmal and frames. Selenium uses javascript and Iframes to embed the browserBot in your browser. Now, you might wonder what a browserBot is. It is actually a mechanism to talk to the page and it is taking care of the complexity of different browsers. We use this especially when uisng JavaScript on the page. BrowserBot is kept in the selenium core that gets distributed with all versions of selenium.
As I said earlier, selenium has different forms such as selenium core, selenium RC, selenium IDE, selenium web driver and selenium GRID. These variants are highlighted below:
Selenium RC:
Selenium RC stands for selenium remote control. If you want to write automated web application, I suggest you to go for selenium RC. It is the best tool to test web application UI tests in any of the programming languages. Selenium has two main characteristics:
- It uses one server which automatically launches and kills the browsers and also acts as a HTTP proxy for web requests.
- It provides client libraries for computer languages.
Selenium RC has so many features such as multi-platform support, multi browser support, multi programming language support as well.
Selenium IDE:
Now I wish to talk about selenium IDE. It’s one of the other noted variants of selenium. Selenium IDE which record and playback method to catch the bugs. For finding bugs through selenium IDE is an easy process, what you have to do is, just copy the website url to the selenium IDE base url and click on start recording. And stop recording whenever you need it. Actually selenium IDE’s body is divided into three phases, one is command, target and value respectively. One main advantage of selenium IDE is nothing but can set breakpoint wherever you want. Break points are the places where you want to stop debugging. It provides an opportunity to walk through the web applications and it helps to find the bugs easily.
Either you can use record and play back method or descriptive programming. Here I suggest you to go for descriptive programming. Which will help you to improve your programming or coding skills.
Selenium web driver:
Selenium web driver is a cross platform testing framework that can control browser from an OS level. Selenium web driver can be used to test applications which are rich in Ajax based functionalities. With the web driver you can create customized test results.
Selenium Grid:
Now a days so many automation testing tools have come in market and highly using those too. One of the exclusive features of selenium grid is that it provides you with the privilege to run test on multiple machines and browsers simultaneously. Literally transformed, you have the option to run multiple tests at the same time that is on different machines against different browsers.
Now you guys will think like when to use it when already having so many tools to test and find bugs?
Actually there are two main reasons why you want to use selenium grid. The main one being the fact that selenium grid is a multitasker. Multiple jobs can be done at a time that is in multiple browsers and multiple browsers on different operating systems. And second reason is, it takes only very less time to test. It also speeds up the execution of test. For example if you have a set of 100 tests, but you set up Selenium grid to support 4 different machines to run those tests, your test set will complete in one fourth the time, as it would if you ran your tests serially on a single machine.
Selenium grid is very flexible to use. Parallel execution is the best part or an advantage of selenium grid. Selenium grid has different versions such as, selenium grid 2.0, selenium grid 1.0.the main difference of selenium grid 2.0 is merged with selenium RC server.
Selenium tools, characterized by features like interoperability & compatibility with respect to the latest browsers and operating systems out there, makes it a unique tool, compared to its counterpart proprietary automation tools. All the exclusive features tagged with selenium makes it a supreme testing tools capable of letting you achieve more in less time, which results in lower operational costs and testing time.
Have some patience:
May be the toughest part of this whole exercise is finding time. You work late hours on projects. Your social calendar is overloaded with lots of works. You can participate in any of the activities. But to gain what you need, you must commit to and allocate some time to your root. Feel free. Happy testing!
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