Selenium Introduction & Why It Is So Cherished Automation Tool

Selenium as Automation Tool

Since More and more cloud based and browser based web applications are being developed and we people are following agile methodology for the development of product so need of quick testing appears as a big question mark before tester and they need some tool through which they can automate their product/web-application with ease. At this point of time some automation tool comes in to mind like QTP,Selenium etc. Then again one more question appears before tester/project managers and various stack-holder, which tool to choose – finally the only thing that comes which one is open source and here Selenium automation framework kill all other automation tool for browser automation.

So why Selenium

1- Open source software released under Apache 2.0 License and due to this, it could be downloaded, could be used without any charge and anyone can do enhancement for its own ease of executing test.

2- A complete framework that could be easily used with the help of any IDE tool like Eclipse

3- Selenium supports many browser and have capability to run on various system at the same time so it also saves time for compatibility testing (through Selenium Grid and with the help of xml used with testng )

4- Selenium core is developed mainly in JavaScript  and has various API to interact with web-application with in Browser(Selenium RC) and also from outside Browser(Selenium WebDriver).

5- Selenium is mainly used for functional and System testing of Web-application and some time tests written for function testing also used in Acceptance and integration tests

6- Selenium also provides Record/Playback option (Selenium IDE) tools that could be used without knowing any scripting language

7- Selenium provide a domain specific language (selenese) to write tests in number of popular programming language like

• Java
• C#
• Php
• Groovy
• Perl
• Python

8- Selenium could be deployed in Linux, Macintosh and Windows operating system with same ease.

9-Selenium has borrowed Xpath to identify Element on web-application from XML  through which user can navigate forward and backward with same ease in identifying element, It also provides locator(mainly for SeleniumIDE, RC and WebDriver )

• By ID
• By Name
• By Link
• By Xpath
• By CSS
• By DOM

So identifying exact element become easy through Selenium in comparison to QTP.

10- Selenium (Webdriver) provides resources for Iphone and Android testing.

Resource :

http://www.skill-guru.com/blog/2010/05/12/selenium-web-application-testing-tool/

http://selftechy.com/2011/02/05/introduction-to-selenium-web-application-test-automation-tool

http://seleniumhq.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenium_(software)

http://wiki.openqa.org/display/SEL/Selenium+Core+FAQ

http://sauceio.com/index.php/category/selenium-knowledge/