Importance of Selenium in Automating Tests and Writing scripts

As a tester, we all have performed manual testing. But it's very much time consuming and sometimes becomes boring. So, Automation testing is the solution to this.

Automation testing is way better than manual testing as it consumes less time and needs less investment in human resource, it is not prone to errors, frequent execution of tests is possible. It supports regression as well as Functional Testing. It also lights out the execution.

One such tool through which we can automate our testing is "Selenium". Let's discuss it in brief.

Selenium

Selenium is an open-source Web User Interface automation testing suite. Nowadays, selenium is widely used for automating the tests.

A variety of programming languages have been supported in selenium through the use of drivers which are specified to particular languages like Java, Python, PHP.

Selenium WebDriver is a collection of open-source APIs which have been used to automate the tests. Basically, the Selenium WebDriver tool is used to automate web application testing to verify that the application is working as it is intended to work. 

Mostly all browsers are supported by selenium i.e. chrome, firefox, I.E., Safari.

Selenium is of four types:

• Selenium IDE
• Selenium RC
• Selenium web driver
• Selenium grid

Let's discuss each one of them shortly,

1.  Selenium IDE- It is basically used in firefox. It is helpful in recording the tester's action which has been performed to test any particular flow.
2.  Selenium RC- Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a testing framework that allows direct execution of the tests. It utilizes all programming languages.
3.  Selenium Webdriver- Selenium web driver sends the command directly to the browser and retrieves the result.
4.  Selenium grid- It helps in running tests correspondingly over different machines and browsers.

Features of Selenium:

• Test scripts can be written through selenium using any of the programming languages like Java, Python, C#, PHP, Ruby, Perl & .Net 
• Selenium supports almost every browser like chrome, firefox, I.E., Safari, Opera. 
• Selenium can be integrated with tools like TestNG & JUnit which are helpful in managing test reports.
• Selenium uses the concept of Hub-End-Nodes. Hub serves as a central source of selenium which is helpful in commanding each node connected to it.
• Selenium saves time.

Assertion

Assertion serves as a checkpoint that can be used in between the test scripts to verify the test status for a  specific test condition. Asserts give us a better way to compare the expected result with the actual result. Asserts are the most frequently used methods while creating Selenium WebDriver test scripts.