What Make Selenium Your Best UI Testing Tool?

Getting automated tests written is not more a luxury for software development team. It is in fact a need and is an effective tool to find bugs during the early phase of software development so that it can be easily rectified without much issues. While building new features during the development phase, developers can run automated tests and check how other parts of the system are affected by those changes.

Through automated tests, it is possible to reduce the cost of fixing the bugs and bringing overall improvements to enhance the quality assurance process.

In this blog, we will take a look at automated tests in selenium and why it should be your UI testing tool.

Choosing the best testing tool is definitely a daunting task and if you take a look at the internet, you will get ample marketing materials that promise everything under the sun. Selenium is a free automated testing tool that is used for web applications across different platforms and browsers. It is not a single tool, but a suite of varied software each catering to different needs of an organization. Mostly QA engineers focus on one or two tools that they need most to complete their project. The operations are highly flexible and allow many options to locate UI elements and also compare the test results against that actual application behavior.

                 

Why should you do user interface testing?

Testing of a software can begin at different places of your software. It is simply like different layers of products, similar to the sedimentary layers that we find while unearthing ancient cities. It is important to use the most appropriate tool that would test the smaller units, see how methods work together, simple scenarios in the UI and also complex product usage. Since all the layers are important, testing of the UI will enable you to know various things from a different perspective.

How selenium testing helps?

Selenium consists of four different components that take care of different testing needs. They are

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

The Web Driver triggers real events in the browser like the mouse clicks, the use of texts, button clicks and etc. All these can help the technical team to build some powerful things. Let’s take a look at why should you use a Web Driver:

Automated checks:

One of the most common reasons that people choose to use Selenium is to drive a set of commands and check the status that helps to see if any transaction is processed, if the user is logged in or if there is anything in the shopping cart. This ensures that the buttons or the labels on the page are proper and are also saved correctly and work accurately.

The Web Driver is used to ask questions that are answered in simple yes or no. It will help to generate a report with numerous assertions specifying the ones passing and failing and where the error has occurred. Once the checks are built, you can run them and use them to find out problems, some unexpected changes and etc.

Long running tasks:

Very lengthy tasks or repetitive works are usually expensive if it has to be done manually. Humans most often lose concentration or focus over time and this mainly leads to errors. But scripts do not make any mistakes and continue to do the same thing each time. With Selenium testing tool, such tasks can be easily assigned to any junior person and given instructions, access to the hardware and the specified time to complete the project. 

Browser compatibility:

Web Driver supports a wide range of web browsers and their varied versions. Not only this, it supports conventional browsers as well as unique and rare browsers like Html Unit browser. The browser executes the test scripts and runs in the headless mode where the user won’t be able to view the test script execution. Web Driver also offers support to web based mobile testing.

Support system:

Selenium automation testing tool is already one of the most popular testing frameworks and it is also an open source platform. This means that all the changes happen due to the involvement of the community. Instead of purchasing a yearly maintenance contract, you can simply go to various forum sections and ask questions or even contact a developer of your choice.

Feature rich:

Since Selenium development is totally based on the needs and the desires of the users and the community, you can easily check the latest features that are available and what will be available soon by looking at the code report.

In a nutshell, I can only say that Selenium is highly flexible and there are various ways you can add functionalities to the test scripts and selenium’s framework to customize your test automation needs. This is in fact the greatest strength of the tool than any other.