Happy Selenium

• Why the Name Selenium?

It came from a joke which Jason cracked one time to his team. Another automated testing framework was popular during Selenium's development, and it was by the company called Mercury Interactive (yes, the company who originally made QTP before it was acquired by HP). Since Selenium is a well-known antidote for Mercury poisoning, Jason suggested that name. His teammates took it, and so that is how we got to call this framework up to the present.

                              

• Why first crush of Automation Engineer is Selenium?

The Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications.

Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.

Selenium is not just a single tool but a suite of software's, each catering to different testing needs of an organization. 

• Do you know selenium very well?

 

• Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Allows you to record, edit, and debug tests
• Selenium Remote Control (RC) : Allows you to write automated web application UI tests in any programming language against any HTTP website using any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser.Selenium 1, refers to Selenium RC.
• Selenium Web Driver: Allows writing automated tests of websites. It aims to mimic the behavior of a real user, and as such interacts with the HTML of the application.
• Selenium Grid : Allows you run your tests on different machines against different browsers in parallel.
• Selenium 2 : Selenium RC and WebDriver are merged into a single framework to form Selenium 2. It has object-oriented APIs from WebDriver and interacts with browsers. It supports a wide range of browsers and multiple language bindings. It can write tests in Java, C#, Ruby, and Python. Selenium 2 also offers a headless driver based on HtmlUnit, which is a Java framework for testing web applications. 
  
  

• Two big player met @ party? 

Parameter	Selenium	QTP
Licensing Cost	It is open source. So, there’s no licensing or renewal cost for this tool. It’s free of cost.	User needs license for QTP which is very costly.
Operating System	Selenium supports more number of OS like Windows, Linux and Macintosh.	QTP supports only Windows.
Actual End-user Simulation	Selenium performs actions in the background on the browser i.e. user can execute tests with the browser minimized.	QTP executes scripts equivalent to a person performing those steps manually on the application. So, browsers can’t be minimized (user cannot perform any other action on the machine while test is running).
Browsers	It supports IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and few more.	It supports only IE and Firefox.
Script Development Language	Scripts can be developed in any of the languages like Java, Ruby, Python, C#, Perl, Groovy and many more.	Scripts can be developed only in VBScript or JavaScript.
Test Development Environment	Test scripts can be developed in various IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio, Netbeans etc.	Test scripts can be developed only in QTP.

• Why Selenium Rocks? 

  

Same Test Script can run on Multiple Web Browses :

Many times QA Engineer have to write several test scripts to check performance of web application on different browser. Using selenium tester can write test script once and run it on multiple browsers.

Option to Choose Programming Language :

Many times tester needs to write test scripts in different languages depending on automation tool. Selenium allows tester to write test scripts in any language depending on their expertise and technical expertise.Many languages are supported including C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby.

open source, freeware and portable tool :

Selenium is open source,freeware and portable tool. It supports many operating systems like Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Unix etc also it uses very less CPU and RAM consumption for script execution.

Framework support :

TestNG and JUnit are the popularly used frameworks, and these could be used for your Selenium testing along with the choice of Java as your programming language. For other languages, frameworks such as NUnit, Behat + Mink, unittest, pyunit, py.test, robot framework, RSpec and Test::Unit are also supported.

It is evident that Selenium offers a range of options to testers and to organizations, and can be used in a variety of configurations with a change in browser, platform, programming language and testing framework. It is no longer necessary to learn a new language just for automating your test environment; neither do you need to be limited by the browser and platform dependency of some testing solutions

• I am falling love with Selenium? 

After learning SELENIUM, I realized that automated tests run fast and frequently, which is cost-effective for software products with a long maintenance life. But before starting automation tester should decide what tests to automate first, their value vs. the effort to create them needs to be considered. Test cases with high value and low effort should be automated first. Accordingly I divide my project into automation test cases and manual test cases which really helped me in timely releases of project with system’s stability and functionality.

Selenium helps same test scripts to run on multiple web browsers by which I tested performance of web application across different browsers.

Really Selenium is best testing tool for automation and very easy to learn.

  

Straight from the Woxiprogrammers desk 

By Jayati Lakade