All About Automation Testing

In automation testing, both Quality Assurance (QA) testing and Selenium testing are two important and quite interwoven operations. But they have some differences. Quality Assurance testing, as the name implies, is the process of testing and monitoring a product to ensure that the finished product is created and built without defects or faults. When it comes to physical manufacturing, QA testing consists of statistical control, failure testing, amongst other industry-specific practices. 

In the case of Selenium testing, it is one of the most widely used open-source Web UI (User interface) automation testing suites. It supports automation across different browsers, platforms and programming languages. Selenium is also easily used on platforms like Linux, Windows, Macintosh, Solaris, amongst others. Also, it supports operating systems for mobile applications like Android, Windows Mobile and iOS.

Here are some differences between QA testing and Selenium testing.

• Mode of Operation

In QA testing, there are some procedures to follow and this procedure is in the form of a cycle. This cycle is divided into four which are Plan, Do, Check, and Act (abbreviated as the PDCA approach). The approach involves an alternative cycle that can be repeated again and again, with each new generation affecting a new change to the product or software involved. Because this approach is regarded as a simple process, it can be used in nearly any industry ranging from testing products on an assembly line to looking for defects in a piece of software. But due to some new trends in the way that software is developed, the old school testing approach used back in the day has changed and some modern methods have been discovered.  

On the other hand, Selenium supports a large number of programming languages that are used for specific drivers. Some of these languages are Java, C#, Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby. But at the moment, the most used programming language for Selenium Web drivers are Java and C#. Selenium test scripts can be written in any of the supported programming languages and they can run directly in many of the modern web browsers. Some of the web browsers that support Selenium testing are Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Google Chrome.

• Use Cases

In QA testing, traditional development models such as the waterfall model in Software Development life cycle(SDLC), make available rooms for QA testing at the end of each stage or cycle. Modern agile methodologies have resulted in faster iterations being performed with less time. This new development has led the software companies to pause and take stock of how the changes might affect the quality of their software. The importance of QA testing can’t be overemphasized. Even though its primary importance is focused on finding faults and defects, the general purpose of Quality Assurance testing goes far beyond that. But the most important use of QA testing is that you can get the best possible user experience. 

Selenium, on the other hand, can be used to automate functional tests, that is It can be integrated into the automation testing tools such as Jenkins, Maven and Docker, to achieve continuous testing. Selenium testing can also be integrated with tools such as TestNG and JUnit which are for managing test cases and generating reports.

• Application in Real-life Situations

By using QA testing, you can determine whether a product is properly functioning or if the product is broken. It can therefore prevent you from releasing a product or an update before it is sent to the market, where any defect can have real-life consequences. It also ensures that when you perform the same functions, you get the same results all the time. This ensures that the user doesn’t have to jump through hoops to get the software to do what they want it to do. 

We live in a computer age where customers are also familiar with the recent technological innovations. So this means that they understand that the presence of bugs in a newly developed software can be inevitable and they might want to wait to try and get a new app until other people have tested and verified the software or application. Some users are even comfortable submitting the big reports from their smartphones. 

On the other hand, the main essence of Selenium testing is to run the test cases multiple times across browsers. The key features of Selenium testing to perform this function is Functional testing and Regression testing. Selenese is regarded as the main domain-specific language for Selenium, but yet many programming languages like Java, C#, Ruby, Python, PHP, Net, and so on, can also be used for writing test scripts. This, therefore, makes the tool user-friendly. Some of the tasks that a Selenium Web Driver can perform include Automation testing, Performance testing, Sanity Testing, Regression testing, Monitoring of applications, and Mobile testing. Performing these tasks is what makes Selenium a framework for automating applications. 

• Functionality

Finally, in QA testing, the end-user can only test the user experience of the software and they don’t have access to the underlying code, so this means that they have no way of testing for major security flaws and defects. But either way,  to depend on the user to report bugs instead of performing your testing is not advisable and will not last. This is because eventually, the users will switch to a piece of software that they know that they can trust to work properly with minimal defects from the start.

One important point to note especially as an IT enthusiast interested in learning Selenium testing is that you should have a basic understanding of Java or any other object-oriented programming language. Some of the languages are C#, Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby. The most used programming languages of all the aforementioned ones are Java and C#. So it is important to know how to use either Java or C#. To learn more about how to use Selenium with Java, you can enroll in a Selenium Web Driver course with Java for beginners.

Finally, it is advisable to also have prior knowledge of software testing techniques like functional testing and automation testing. You will also learn this in the beginner course.