All about Selenium

We all know that Software Testing involves a lot of repetitive tasks. Now to reduce these repetitive tasks,

software testers need the help of some tools which can enable them to automate these repetitive tasks.

One of the great suites of automation tools is Selenium.

Selenium Suite:

Selenium is an open-source, which provides the capabilities to automate user actions

on a web application, using any web browser.

Now let's see components of a selenium

Selenium IDE

Selenium RC

Selenium WebDriver

Selenium GRID

Selenium IDE:

Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) an extension available for both Firefox and Chrome. This works on the principle of record and playback and save.

It has inbuilt assertion functionality

Selenium IDE can help  pinpoint the actual cause of frontend bugs

It supports third party plugins to do some  of the volume load testing cloud, uploading scripts to cloud.

It will store multiple locators for each element

It supports the cross browser testing

It has debugger which allows step execution, add breaking points

We can add java script code in to  testcases

It allows to export recorded scripts in many languages like HTML, Java, Ruby, Python, C# ,

Junit we can use them in Selenium RC or WebDriver.

Limitations:

Does not support data driven testing

Cannot perform database testing

It do not provide detailed reports

Selenium RC:

Selenium Remote Control is a server implemented in Java. It  can accept commands for browsers using the HTTP. Tests can be in any language like python, java, C#

Selenium WebDriver

Selenium WebDriver  is the most commonly used component of Selenium. WebDriver works on the OS level and uses  JSON wire protocol  to communicate with browsers . WebDriver allows users to write custom code in their language of choice and interact with the browser of their choice, through browser-specific drivers.

Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid is also an important component of Selenium. It runs tests on different machines against different browsers and OS simultaneously, Which gives ability to run tests in parallel. It can also be integrated with containerization tools like docker to make the execution of tests faster.

Limitations:

Costs associated with purchasing and maintaining infrastructure. The requirement for a special machine setup.

Selenium(version2,3,4)

The features of WebDriver and RC were imbibed in version 2 of WebDriver and called as selenium2. 

Selenium3  was an upgrade over Selenium 2 in many terms. Selenium 4 communicates with the browser via the browser driver using the w3c protocol. The browser driver comes as an executable file and differs for different browsers.

The browser driver communicates with the respective browser via HTTP protocol

Limitations:

No built-in reporting mechanism for test results. Performance limitations for large-scale testing. Browser compatibility issues. Handling dynamic elements. Cannot support window application.