Agile adaptation in the software development process speeds up many processes. This includes savings in total software development time, delivery time (TTD), commercialization time (TTM), and a reduction in development costs. To ensure quality and efficiency in the testing process, the demand for QA testing tools has increased.

Of the many automation testing tools available, Selenium is one of the most widely used for testing web applications. But why is it so in demand? What advantages does it have compared to other development tools? In the following article we will address all the information about one of the most used tools within QA testing.

What is Selenium?

It is an open source tool used to automate tests performed in browsers. That is, web applications are tested using any browser. In fact, from their own website they define this tool as:

“An umbrella project for a range of tools and libraries that enable and support web browser automation.”

Of course, the following must be pointed out: only the test of web applications is possible with Selenium. We cannot test any desktop application (software) or test any mobile application using this tool.

How is Selenium made up?

Here are some tools that are under the Selenium umbrella for QA testing, among them are:

Selenium 1 / Selenium RC or “Remote Control”: Selenium RC was Selenium’s main project for a long time. This happened before the Selenium Webdriver merger produced Selenium 2, the newest and most powerful tool.

Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment): It is an extension for Firefox and Chrome. Records and reproduces a set of user interactions in the browser as test cases.

Selenium Grid: It is a server that supports running test cases on different remote machines. It enables the Selenium RC solution to scale for large test suites and to run in multiple environments.

Selenium Web Driver: Provides a test domain specific language for writing in the most popular programming languages. Among them: Java, C #, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby.

What are the advantages of using Selenium?

Selenium is open source and has no associated license fee. Selenium has a number of advantages over other QA Testing tools. But, what reasons explain this popularity? Let’s check! The following list is prepared with the information from V-Soft Consulting:

• Transparency: Ensures agility and transparency across all cross-functional teams in the software development cycle (developers, quality assurance, operations, clients, and management).
• Platform independent: With Selenium time is saved in writing test scripts for each platform where it will be tested.
• Saves TTM and TTD: In the case of manual tests, these are uncertain, because product delivery times and time to market are lost. Therefore, it increases the cost of the project in general. However, Selenium prevents testers from writing test scripts for each platform. This also saves time and avoids the regression testing process.
• Encourage continuous integration efforts: Continuous integration and continuous delivery streamline the software development process. By automating the testing process, Selenium assists in the implementation of a successful continuous integration (CI).
• Reduce response time: Selenium framework makes it easy for test teams to run multiple test cases in multiple browsers. This reduces the response time by ensuring extreme quality testing.
• Integration with other tools: “Selenium with Java” is famous like the rest of the available integrations such as ExtentReports, Sikuli, Appium, etc. Therefore, Selenium provides flexibility for testers to integrate with these tools and extend their functionalities.

Why choose Selenium over other automation testing tools?

Selenium encourages testers to write a script in a programming language. Additionally, the same test scripts can be run on multiple browser platforms.

WebDriver is becoming part of the W3C standard (World Wide Web Consortium) for all browsers. Therefore, the browser development will automatically support Selenium. According to V-Soft, “the interesting aspect of this tool is that it offers a great set of options to test and compare the results. […] The developers will know reliably if the application behaved as they intended”.

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