Selenium - Web automation tool

                   

Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web apps across many platforms. It is a GUI based automation tool. Selenium first came to life in 2004 that was developed by Jason Huggins when he was testing an internal application at Thought Works. He developed a JavaScript library that could drive interactions with the page, allowing him to automatically rerun tests against multiple browsers. Selenium RC (aka. Selenium 1) was ground-breaking because no other product allowed you to control a browser from a language of your choice.

Selenium was not adopted on a large scale for quite some time until Google put its weight behind the selenium project. Google had long been a heavy user of Selenium. Being a champion on open source technologies it is apt the Google uses Selenium for its test automation. In 2006 an engineer at Google named Simon Stewart started work on a project he called WebDriver (aka. Selenium 2). In 2008 Selenium and WebDriver merged.

Selenium is possibly the most widely-used open source solution. For companies whose entire infrastructure is built on the World Wide Web it makes sense to use Selenium for all web automation needs. Companies who are dependent on legacy technologies like PowerBuilder and Mainframes will never be able to appreciate Selenium because selenium works only with web applications.

Programming Language 

Or should I say the Programming Languages supported by Selenium are

v  C# (Dot Net)

v  Java

v  Perl

v  Ruby

v  Python

v  PHP

The real beauty of Selenium is that you can pick the language you are comfortable with and start using that as your primary scripting language.

Cross Platform Testing 

Selenium deploys on the following operating systems

v  Windows

v  Linux

v  Solaris

v  OS X

I was able to execute the scripts created on a windows machine on a machine running Ubuntu. Not many commercial tools can claim that

Cross browser testing 

 Perhaps the biggest selling point of Selenium has to be Cross browser testing capability. Although the Selenium IDE is a Firefox extension only, Scripts can be executed on the following browsers

v  Internet Explorer

v  Firefox

v  Opera

v  Chrome

v  Safari

v  Android and iphone browsers

I was able to execute the same scripts on IE, Firefox and Chrome. Imagine the smile on my face when I did thatJ. Not many testers can claim that!!!

Others advantages -

v  Multiple Selenium tests can be run concurrently on any number of local or remote systems, thus minimizing test execution time.

v  Mobile application testing is also possible using selenium although I have never had a chance to do that.

Selenium components 

Selenium comprises of the following three components

v  Selenium IDE

v  Selenium Remote Control / WebDriver

v  Selenium Grid

Selenium IDE

v  Selenium IDE is a complete integrated development environment (IDE) for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension

v  Selenium IDE is the a Firefox plug-in that does record-and-playback of interactions with the browser

v  Allows recording, editing, and debugging tests

Selenium Remote Control / Selenium WebDriver

v  Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a server, written in Java, which accepts commands for the browser via HTTP. Selenium Remote Control has been officially deprecated

v  Selenium WebDriver is the successor to Selenium RC. Selenium WebDriver accepts commands (sent in Selenese, or via a Client API) and sends them to a browser

Architectural Representation

Testing Framework

You can use either TESTNG or JUNIT I leave that choice to you. I started off my initial selenium endeavor with JUNIT but ended up with TESTNG

Reporting

  

All the software automation tools are judged by the depth and the quality of report the tool can generate and selenium is no exception. In our case we started with the native TESTNG reporting and later moved to customized Notepad reporting. Not content with notepad report we explored excel reporting also and succeeded. Our ambitions slightly increased and we started generating HTML reporting. Did we stop there? No way! We also created PDF report. Like in other tools we can take screen prints of failed or passed scenarios, send out emails with the results and screen prints to all the stake holders.

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