Selenium Introduction

As we have decided to share the total Selenium automation test series, this is our first tutorial of the “Selenium Automation Tutorials” series. In these tutorials, we are going to discuss the basics of Selenium Introduction, different components of selenium, features, and limitations.

What is Selenium?

Selenium is a free open source automation tool which is used to test web-based application on multiple browsers and multiple platforms (operating system). Most of the companies are using this tool for functional and regressions testing.

Selenium is not a single tool its a group of tools. Mainly there are 4 components present in selenium: Selenium IDE, RC, WebDriver, and Grid. Out of which Selenium webDriver and Grid are famous. Different components of selenium are providing different features like multiple browser support, parallel test execution capabilities, running the same test in multiple machines, and so many other features.

Using selenium, we can automate all types of websites irrespective of the technology in which the application is designed. The performance and execution speed of this tool is much better than any other available tools in the market.

Selenium Components

There are 4 components present in selenium that are:

Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment).
Selenium RC(Remote Control) – deprecated now
Selenium WebDriver
Selenium Grid

Let’s understand what the use of each component one by one:

Selenium IDE

Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is one of the simplest frameworks in the selenium suite, and it comes as a browser add-on for Mozilla Firefox and Chrome browsers, which is a record and playback kind of tools. IDe has not supported the programming features and for writing test scripts in Selenium IDE selense language is used. If a test case is written in IDE, then you can export to a different programming language like Ruby, Java, C#, etc. This tool also provides edit and debug option along with the record and playback. This tool is so helpful to the beginners to understand the Selenium syntax.

Advantages Of Selenium IDE

It’s very easy to use and install
It has an inbuilt test result report module
For using this, no programming experience required
You can use this to create and execute test cases in firefox and chrome browser.
By using this, a user can easily create, record, or edit the test scripts.

Disadvantages Of IDE

You can not iterate the statements
It does not support conditional statements
It does not support error handling
By using this, you can not do Database testing
A User can use only in Firefox and Chrome browser only.
It’s not providing the details execution report

Selenium RC

Selenium RC (Remote Control) is a testing tool that is used for web application testing. It supports multiple programming languages like Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python, and C#. It also multiple browsers like firefox, chrome, Ie, and other browsers and also supports multiple operating systems. Also, this is called Selenium 1.

Selenium WebDriver

It is the most important tool of selenium suite because it has many advantages of Selenium Rc and IDE. By using this, you can directly run your script without doing any manual process like start the Selenium server because there is a direct communication between code and browser.

We have written a details post about selenium architecture, you can check here:

Selenium Grid

It is used when we run our automation scripts in multiple browsers across multiple operating system machines simultaneously. It’s used for parallel testing. It is used for test execution.

Grid Features

1. It allows us to run our automation tests on various web browsers, environments, and machines simultaneously and also save time.
2. Helps in test suite completion faster as we are running various tests parallelly, and also we can perform cross-browser testing.

Advantages of Selenium

It’s an open-source tool.
It supports multiple programming languages.
It supports multiple operating systems browsers.
It supports parallel testing.

Disadvantages of Selenium

It Supports only web-based applications, and you can not test window-based applications.
It is difficult to test images based applications.
It doesn’t have an inbuilt report facility.
It does not support Captcha and Barcode readers.
The tester should have the good programming knowledge to write selenium automation script.

If You want to add something, then you can comment in the comment section.

Ref: Article

Selenium Introduction – Different Components [WebDriver & Grid]