One of the major success stories of open source is Selenium. The web app testing framework has been around since just after the year 2000 and has become the industry standard QA tool.
It serves as a symbol of the internet's once-promising revolutionary potential. It is a free tool made and modified by and for a large developer community throughout the world.
What is Selenium?
Jason Huggins created a core tool named "JavaScriptTestRunner" to test ThoughtWorks' internal Time and Expenses application. This tool served as the inspiration for Selenium. It is now gaining popularity among software testers and developers as a portable open-source automated testing platform. In order to test online applications, it offers the ability to automate browsers using specific browser bindings. It comprises a set of four tools with a range of applications. Let's get a detailed understanding of Selenium and the different tools it provides.
Pros of Selenium
It is free and open-source
Everyone adores Selenium because it is totally free and open-source.
This makes using Selenium for automated testing simple for companies of all sizes.
Because it is open-source, there are no fees and the community is always creating new features.
Live community
As mentioned earlier, Selenium is commonly brought up while talking about test automation.
About 30% of automation solutions are built on Selenium, which is already used by more than 50k companies in their test automation frameworks (for example, TestProject's 100% free test automation platform, which combines Selenium and Appium for you along with a variety of other features!).
Because Selenium is widely used by specialists, the community is kept alive through blog postings, courses, forum discussions, and tools created to help one another.
Language Agnostic
A new programming language is not required to use a testing automation tool.
Thank goodness that's not the case here. Because Selenium WebDriver offers native bindings for JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, and Ruby, it is more likely that you or your team holds the necessary programming skills.
Although this is the case, Selenium still has its own syntax, making it difficult to become fluent in one of these languages.
Supports Test Automation Frameworks
Selenium can be coupled with the Maven or ANT frameworks for source code compilation.
With the help of well-liked and widely-used testing frameworks like TestNG and RSpec, it can also be used to test programs and produce results.
Additionally, it works well with Jenkins and other continuous integration technologies, and it can even communicate with other open-source programs to allow extra capabilities.
Selenium has good support for features, as well as for the creation and automation of multiple test cases, due to its respectable age.
Selenium Supports Parallel Testing
Parallel testing can provide both more efficient and ineffective testing.
The entire test suite is separated and conducted on various hardware simultaneously rather than running as a single sequential data flow, enabling a significantly faster feedback loop.
A suite can be performed in a fraction of the time required to acquire test case results when it is divided into digestible portions.
Cons of Selenium
Learning curve
The best Selenium implementation is Selenium WebDriver.
To become proficient at using Selenium WebDriver, it takes time and effort.
It takes a lot of learning to start automation testing with Selenium WebDriver. Test automation is currently evolving toward codeless solutions, or without the need for programming knowledge.
Users of Chrome and Firefox can only access Selenium IDE, a simple tool for test automation that could be used as an alternative.
No built-in reporting capabilities
Selenium lacks reporting, a crucial feature.
Testers and developers must create reports with test automation results for management, vendors, clients, and stakeholders.
In order to obtain information about how tests were executed and provide test reports, Selenium also has to be integrated with various frameworks and libraries.
Solutions like TestProject make such Selenium dashboards and reporting features readily available, free of charge, and without the need to integrate any additional third-party tools.
High TCO
What is selenium's primary flaw? Most likely, its increased cost is to blame. But hold on a minute. Didn't we state that selenium is free?
Because it is an open-source solution, you don't need to buy a license to use it. However, it is not truly free.
Consider the whole cost of ownership while purchasing any commodity, not just selenium (TCO).
Due to the steep learning curve, lack of technical support, the requirement of additional tools for some functionalities, and other difficulties, the overall cost of Selenium ends up being substantially higher than the zero you see on its price tag.
Web Only
Selenium is the name of a web-specific automated testing tool.
Mobile native apps and mobile hybrid apps are not supported, although it can be used to test mobile web apps with appropriate plugins.
Desktop applications are in no way supported. It might be completely eliminated from many QA endeavors just because of that restriction.
Limited Support Behind the Scenes
Selenium is one of the most popular testing tools on the market, however, its impact goes far beyond its infrastructure.
As an open-source program, its development staff is modest and comprised of volunteers.
For the entire year of 2018, there were only a dozen or so regular contributors. In addition, since 2016, just one person has been responsible for maintaining the integrated development environment (IDE).
Due to this, the IDE temporarily stopped supporting Firefox in late 2018. Since then, things have improved, but there is no tech support and open-source technologies are notoriously slow to improve.
Conclusion
Without a doubt, Selenium is the most popular test automation tool in use today. Due to Selenium's powerful advantages and features, many firms all over the world are currently automating their testing with it.
Technologies like TestProject, which make use simple by preventing the installation of Selenium and a variety of other tools like Appium for mobile testing and reporting libraries because TestProject already includes them, making it feasible to use Selenium APIs in tests built on a platform.
