Selenium WebDriver PROS & CONS In Details

Selenium WebDriver PROS & CONS

The initial release of Selenium had four main components. It is referred to as SeleniumRC

• Selenium Integrated Development Environment(IDE)
• Selenium Remote Control – Selenium(RC)
• Web Driver
• Selenium Grid

Later, the component Selenium(RC) and WebDriver were merged to form Selenium 2, also known as Selenium WebDriver. Selenium RC has been officially deprecated.

WebDriver PROS / Advantage:

• Selenium is open-source, so anyone can download and start using it.
• It supports multiple languages for creating and executing tests by using a different language like Java, C#,.Net, Python, pearl, ruby, PHP, Javascript.
• It is platform independents means it supports various operating systems like Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix.
• It is used for cross-browser testing like Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Opera browser.
• It supports headless browser (PhantomJS, HTMLUnitdriver, Chrome headless)
• It can be integrated with an open-source unit testing framework (TestNG, JUnit – TDD, BDD Framework – Cucumber Jbehave Serenity)
• Its very lightweight, it uses fewer hardware resources as compared to other testing tools like UFT/QTP.
• Available in the form of API.
• Easily integrated with the CI-CD process (Jenkins)
• It can be executed on the local machine as well as on cloud / Virtual machine/servers (Example – Browserstack, source labs, AWS, Docker)
• We can customize the webdriver codebase because the source code is shared.
• It Supports Parallel test execution using the selenium grid.
• By using selenium, we can perform functional, regression, usability, and UAT Testing.
• It Supports to test ajax functionalities and helps to monitor changes in the content without the page load.

Selenium WebDriver CONS / Disadvantage

• As its open-source, so there is no direct support.
• It is a set of tools for example JDK + Eclipse + Webdriver + TestNG + Firebug + Firepath, so tool setup is more complicated than other tools like QTP/UFT where you configure one tool.
• You need to learn to program – No script less / Codeless automation.
• Using selenium webdriver, we can not automate desktop application
• No default reporting facility for test results.
• For doing extra works like test case design, report, build, CI-CD selenium does not provide any API.
• It is not supported to automate Scenario like barcode/code captcha.

If you found I have missed mentioning some pros or cons, you can mention that in the comment section.