Selenium

What is Selenium?

Selenium is an open-sourced automated testing tool that is used to test web applications across various browsers. It was developed by Jason Huggins in 2004 and was written in Java. It is a powerful automation tool that can be used to validate and verify a web application.

Why is Selenium so popular?

• Selenium is easy to use as it provides a user-friendly interface that helps create and execute tests easily and effectively.
• It is a publicly available automation framework that is freely accessible to anyone. It is therefore an open-sourced framework.
• It saves a lot of time and effort as multiple tests can be run in parallel.
• It is platform independent and can work with various operating systems like Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix.
• It works with various web browsers like Safari, Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Firefox.
• Tests can be coded in various programming languages including Java, Python, Ruby,Perl and PHP and Selenium converts it into compatible source in no time.
• Selenium can be integrated with tools like JUnit and TestNG for test management.
• It can also use with with testing frameworks like PyTest and Python Behave and also with CI/CD framework like Jenkins.
• Selenium requires less hardware compared to other testing tools.

Although Selenium has a number of advantages, it also has a few disadvantages that need to be taken into consideration.
These include:

• It has limited support for desktop applications and is mainly designed for online application testing.
• The program writing time is high and requires good programming skills.
• Selenium does not have built in reporting capabilities and testers must therefore depend on third-party reporting tools.
• You cannot automate CAPTCHA and SMS based OTP web applications.
• It has a small community so it lacks proper online support so you need to put a lot of efforts to find solution to your problem.
• Seleniums automation depends on the browser's automation capabilities which can sometimes lead to inconsistencies across different browsers.

In conclusion, although there are a few disadvantages to using Selenium for automation testing, it is widely used because of it flexibility and easy of use.