Several Lessons Learned with Selenium

Today we have many choices of open-source software tools for automation testing such as Jmeter, OpenSTA, WebLoad and Selenium. Among these, Selenium offers an excellent set of best practices, and it is the tool worth investigating.

​Selenium is a web-based application testing software initially developed by Jason Huggins in 2004. It is an open-source software that works on all three major platforms – Windows, Mac and Linux. Selenium supports a wide range of languages, including Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, C#, PHP and others. For a quick start with Selenium, we use Selenium IDE which has the Record and Playback tool to record and playback scripts. We use Selenium RC to write and run test scripts for testing web application UI’s. Selenium WebDriver allows driving browsers locally or remotely as a user. And, the other tool is Selenium Grid which provides a test execution mechanism for executing test cases on different machines. ​ Selenium has many advantages, including: Simple and powerful testing of DOM (Document Object Model) Supporting continuous integration, suitable for agile projects Supporting multiple platforms and browsers Allowing distributed testing through Selenium Grid Able to integrate with other tools such as TestNG, Sikuli and AutoIt There are a number of limitations of Selenium, however. One limitation is that it does not provide logs and other details on test results after executing test cases. Thus, it is difficult for us to debug test scripts. Another is that, we do not have any option to verify the location of images when needed. And it does not support automating non-web application elements such as windows for uploading, downloading and required authentication When working with Selenium, I have faced a number of problems which I have resolved successfully. I am sharing below several lessons that I followed to overcome limitations of Selenium.

Lession 1: Integration Selenium with Sikuli to verify images....Readmore...