What is Selenium & Why is Selenium as the Best Tool for Automation Testing?
A high school student would answer that Selenium is a chemical element that has an atomic number 34 in the periodic table, but the same student will find an entirely different answer when he enters into IT. Well, are you ready to know the other answer for the question, the answer goes this way ‘Selenium is an automation tool to test web applications’.
What is Selenium?
Have you ever wondered why Software Testing plays a major role in the Software Development Life Cycle? Selenium acts as a counterpart of the Automation testing, where the manual tasks that used to be done in a hectic way and also over multiple times were consuming a lot of time.
Software Testing is a critical task to run a software product successfully, which must be tested thoroughly before its delivery to the client or the end-users with effective performance All the software applications in the market are tested properly and are less prone to malfunctions, but still, they will get defects. When deploying a software product it is important to fix all the bugs and issues and make sure that none of those show up in the future. In recent days, automation testing has become very famous because of the diverse advantages that it holds, which increases the efficiency and the effectiveness of the software applications. Among all the automation testing tools Selenium holds the highest stability, this obviously gets Selenium an upper hand when it comes to automation testing. Unlike other software testing tools, Selenium is not just a single tool rather a suite of tools, which focuses on providing a complete solution for Test Automation. With the help of its entire package Selenium promises to provide a complete solution to cover different types of tests, like cross-platform testing, cross-browser testing, functionality testing, etc. In nutshell, Selenium can be described as a boon for testers as it eases up their daily tasks and allows them to customize the test case scenarios along with supporting test reporting as well. With all being said, the newest release of Selenium ‘version 4’ showed up with a lot of cool new features like full-page screenshots, relative locators and etc. For all web applications, Selenium comes with a modern solution for the decade-old and the newest problems that a software tester faces during the process of testing.
Why Selenium for Testing?
Now we have got enough information about Selenium and its accompanying software tools, let’s know why everyone chooses Selenium for automation testing.
Open Source Tool: Since Selenium is an open-source tool, Selenium users don’t require to spend any money on licensing the software application tool. This one reason provides Selenium an upper-hand over other automation testing tools.
A tool that has everything under one roof: Like it is been mentioned earlier, Selenium is not just a single tool but a suite of tools that suits all the requirement of the users. An automation tester can use a single tool for multiple purposes, as it has been developed that way, WebDriver, IDE, and Grid to fulfill different requirements.
Supports All Major Languages: One of the major challenges that an automation tester faces with the testing tool is to choose between the languages that support Selenium. Since Selenium supports most of the major programming languages like Java, Python, JavaScript, C #, .Net, Ruby, Perl, and PHP, as Selenium provides a handful of options it is easy to pick one.
Operating System and Browser Support: Selenium supports browser automaton for Chrome, Opera, Edge, Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox and diverse operating systems like, Windows, Mac, and Linux, which makes it flexible for cross-platform and cross-browser testing.
Community Support: Selenium is one of the wide software application tools that have an open community that helps everyone to solve their queries and issues that are related to it, which makes it the best choice of software testing tool when it comes to browser automation.
To Sum Up
Selenium is one of the best tools for web automation that can be used for all kinds of interactions that are done in a browser, one can perform automation testing by writing the code in any of their preferred programming languages supported by Selenium, which will easily run all your automation scripts to automate based on its functionality. Selenium’s ease of use makes it stand out of all its competitors in the market, Selenium’s grid will even run all the test scripts parallelly across all browsers in different systems. Give a break for your waiting time and start writing your first automation script in Selenium and test it against a browser. Undergo Selenium training in Chennai to get a real-time exposure of automation testing and also land a job in automation, Automation Engineers / SDETs are one of the hottest jobs in the IT field that are being paid lucratively.