How Selenium Stands Out to be Preferred for Test Automation

Everyone knows about the test automation tool Selenium, but not many are being aware of the reason that it is preferred among others. First Selenium isn’t a single tool, it is composed of several testing tools, with each having its own purpose. There are organizations that directly start off with Selenium IDE as it is easy to automate especially for those who have no prior experience in scripting language or programming, it also can be adopted into Selenium commands. However one needs to understand that the Selenium toolkit is best suited for web-based applications.

Selenium Tool Suite

Several versions of the Selenium tools and automation testing is mentioned below:

Selenium Web Driver

Selenium Web Driver – the latest upgraded version of Selenium so far. It consists of all the features that of an API structure that puts an end to the limitations of the previous versions. It has the Web Driver API as the technology along with the previous version of Selenium supports the Web Application Protocol Interface. A combination of these 2 is the reason why Selenium comes to the maximum level of flexibility to automate test cases. Along with that Selenium Web Driver runs with the Selenium Remote Control interface for supporting the backward compatibility.

Selenium Remote Control

Selenium 1 or Selenium Remote Control was the initial Selenium developments, it was the main project of Selenium. However, the Selenium Remote Control is now considered to be deprecated and the Selenium team isn’t providing any support for the latest software technology. Selenium being the most sophisticated and handy pick for test automation, Selenium RC is an important component in its test suite. The Selenium RC is a testing framework that lets a Tester or a Developer to write test cases in any programming language to automate the application based on its UI against any HTTP websites. Undergoing Selenium training in Chennai will gain you a good command over Selenium automation testing.

Selenium IDE

The Selenium Integrated Development Environment or Selenium IDE is a tool that acts as a prototype that is used to build the test scripts. It is a Firefox plug-in that provides an easy and user-friendly user interface to create an automated test execution environment. One of the unique features of Selenium IDE is the recording feature that can record the user functions when they are executed and then in a detailed script of those actions are exported in multiple programming languages that can be later executed.

Selenium Grid

The Selenium Grid is one in the Selenium Tool suite that enables the Selenium Remote control version to measure for large test solutions and for those automation and testing tools that are going to be run in multiple frameworks,different environments against different browsers. It is a part of the Selenium suite that specializes running different test cases across multiple browsers, machines and operating systems. One can easily connect to it with Selenium Remote Control just by specifying the name of the browser, the version of the browser and the operating system that needs to be used. It can be easily specified all these values through the capabilities of Selenium Remote Control.

Hub & Node

Selenium Grid has the hub and node architecture, follow the below points to gain an overview of Selenium Grid.

• The hub acts as the central point where the test can be loaded.
• A Selenium Grid should be having only one hub
• The hub can be launched only in a single machine, i.e., only a single machine can act as a hub.
• The machine acting as a hub is where the tests will be run but the test automated output, the browser will be executed in the node machines.

With the help of Selenium Grid, cross-platform automation testing can be achieved in a simple way, altogether Selenium acts as a sophisticated tool to achieve functional automation testing across different platforms. One of the mentionable facts about Selenium Grid is that it can be automated parallel in different operating systems and the results can be achieved in a very short time and also can be repeated multiple times without wasting much time when compared to the manual processes.