What makes Selenium most popular among various enterprises, like Google and face book, for testing web interface is the fact that it is free. As soon as the Selenium is set up it starts to efficiently generate test scripts, check for its functionality and further reuse the scripts for automated test frameworks. Working with Selenium required expert knowledge and of course third party, like pcloudy, tools to function in full force.
Let us first talk about the pros of Selenium Testing:
- This is a free download with no upfront or additional costs. Along with this the support provided is also free, even though it is community based.
- Selenium may have its own language for the script but it is not restrictive to usejust that. Selenium can work together with language binding to assist the developer by working in the language they may be comfortable with. These could be Java, C#,python,PHP,etc.
- The Selenium test can practically run under several different browsers.
- Its scripts are mostly created by the way of recording the actions by using the web application that is under test run, in a browser. Selenium scripts could be saved and also re-run at any given time. These tests can also be created manually by using the web development tools.
- Selenium also greatly supports the web applications which implements part of its functionality within browser using AJAX technologies and JavaScript.
- It does not stop or interfere with the QA’s selection of build systems, reporting tools or any other testing framework. Selenium is said to integrate well with all the popular tools.
Cons of Selenium
- We cannot call Selenium complete in terms of being automated since it also requires language bindings, third-party frameworks, and all to be actually effective.
- A support that Selenium does not provide is sharing test and results in anything but by manual means.
- Even though Selenium works with all test script languages, but it also demands a much higher-level of technical skill like programming.
- The test scripts of Selenium are not very user-friendly when we speak in terms of readability, and also difficult to even modify. Now for this reason the testers discard the actual scripts and then recording these again, which is actually very time consuming.
- Selenium does not support tests running parallel, on one single computer.
- Selenium usually has some or the other sort of technical issue with other browsers leaving aside Firefox. Moreover it does not even support and loops, conditionals, and has some trouble finding the locators without any help from the third part tools.
- Selenium does not have test management facilities. The Test scripts gets saved are saved as files that are without attributes. Therefore, for organizing these individual scripts be it in whatever fashion via an additional user interface requires a custom application or a tool from the third-party.
It is because of these many advantages that Selenium Testing is used for User Interface, regression, and acceptance testing. Also, because Selenium enables rapid test development it becomes a popular choice. It is a popular choice among IT people that use it for automating repetitive and web-based tasks of the administration.