Why Selenium..!

Basically, Selenium is an open source automation tool used for functional and regression testing. It is a collection of different tools and different people contribute to the Selenium Project. The key person behind Selenium is Jason Huggins who started Selenium project back in 2004.

In general, it automates browser but more specifically It automates web based applications and eliminates repetitive manual tasks to achieve better efficiency and speed to perform testing. Selenium offers  great advantages in comparison to other automation tools like HP UFT/QTP, Tosca etc.

[source: www.seleniumhq.com ]




It has four components namely Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Selenium Remote Control (RC), WebDriver and Selenium Grid but nowadays, all the automation is done using  Selenium WebDriver and we will focus on that here.

In this post, we will learn about various features and advantages of using selenium.

  1. The main advantage of using Selenium is that it is an open source (free) tool. So, it offers great cost advantage over other tools.

  2. It is platform independent and can be used with different Operating systems like Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

  3. It supports variety of programming languages including but not limited to JAVA, Python, Ruby, C# etc.

  4. It supports and can run tests across multiple browsers like Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera etc.

  5. Selenium project community is growing day by day, so it updates continuously and we can get more resources and repositories.

  6. It can perform parallel testing using Selenium grid.

  7. Selenium also support mobile devices.

  8. Furthermore, it is easy to implement and integrate with IDE like Eclipse and Intellij.

Hence, we can conclude that Selenium offers great advantages for automation testing. In coming posts, we will learn more about selenium tool and will write actual scripts using JAVA to automate some demo scenarios and process.

Cheers.. !

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