Selenium & Automation

Define Selenium
Selenium is a open-source software framework widely used for automating web browsers, web application testing, including load testing functional testing, and regression testing across various browsers and platforms. Selenium can be used to extract data from websites by programmatically navigating web pages, filling out forms, clicking buttons, and extracting information from the resulting pages. Test scripts can used to simulate the user interactions with a web application to verify that it behaves as expected. Selenium can automate repetitive tasks in web browsers, such as filling out web forms, navigating websites, and taking screenshots.
Architect of Selenium Framework
Selenium Software is not just a single tool but a comprises of suite of software, each piece performs to different Selenium QA testing

*- 1. *- Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

• 2. - Selenium Remote Control (RC)
• 3. - WebDriver
• 4. - Selenium Grid ****

Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE):
Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is an open-source record-and-playback tool primarily designed for creating and running Selenium test cases. Browser extensions available for selenium ide are chrome, Firefox, edge.

Selenium Remote Control (RC)
This is an older version of Selenium that has been largely replaced by WebDriver. It was the first Selenium project that allowed developers and testers to write automated web tests in various programming languages. Later, Selenium RC has been largely deprecated and replaced by Selenium WebDriver due to limitations and issues in its architecture.

WebDriver:
Selenium WebDriver is a core component of the Selenium framework that enables automation of web browsers. WebDriver allows you to write scripts in various programming languages to automate tasks in web browsers It provides a programming interface to interact with web elements and perform actions on web pages.

Selenium Grid :
Selenium Grid is a component of the Selenium automation framework that used for parallel test execution. It enables running tests on multiple machines and browsers simultaneously, making it useful for large-scale testing.

Why Selenium in Automation Testing:
Testing is the most crucial phase in the software development lifecycle and its main objective is to ensure bug-free software that meets customer requirements. Manually Testing the software is strenuous and manual execution of test cases against various applications to detect bugs and errors takes ample of time, so selenium came into picture and makes the testing highly validated and done in lesser time.

Features of Selenium Testing:
Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing: Selenium allows you to test web applications across multiple web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Internet Explorer. This is essential for ensuring that web applications work correctly and consistently on various browsers, which is critical given the diversity of browsers used by end-users.

Load Balancing: Selenium Grid provides load balancing capabilities, distributing test execution evenly across available nodes. ensuring that new code changes do not introduce unintended side effects or break existing functionality.

Efficiency and Speed: Automation with Selenium can execute tests much faster than manual testing method and lesser bugs & error in testing. Automated tests perform repetitive tasks consistently and precisely, reducing the likelihood of human errors and ensuring that tests are executed the same way every time.

Reusability: Test scripts written with Selenium can be reused across different test scenarios, saving time and effort in script creation and maintenance

_Support for Multiple Programming Languages: _Selenium supports multiple programming languages like., Java, Python, C#, Ruby enabling teams to use their preferred language for test automation and it can be integrated with various third-party tools and frameworks to enhance testing capabilities.

Continuous Integration (CI) Integration: Selenium can be seamlessly integrated into CI/CD pipelines, allowing you to automate test execution as part of your development workflow.

Scalability: Selenium can scale to accommodate the growing test suites for the projects and the need for concurrent testing on multiple browsers and platforms can be increased

Headless Testing: Selenium supports headless browser testing, where the browser operates without a visible GUI. This is useful for running tests in the background, and reducing the resource consumption and improves the test execution speed.