Selenium always finds its way into the picture in a discussed around automation testing. It is loved by both developers and testers alike. Selenium is used for automation testing and has become a major tool for this task. But if you wondering if automation testing is a big deal, check this out. Automation testing is set to be on a steady increase in the coming years, making the demand for automation testers high.
A research conducted by Transparency Market Research (TMR)revealed that the global Test Automation Market would hit $85 billion by 2024. This figure, whilst huge, should not come as a surprise. As more applications are developed, test cases skyrockets alongside. And this is why manual testing is quickly fading away. Tests need to be more efficient and accurate. This is what automation testing brings to the table. Hence, the spike in its demand in the market.
But Selenium is not the only automation testing tool out there. While there are many other’s Selenium is however it is the number 1.
Google search “Learn automation testing” and check the result. A large chunk of the courses is Selenium online courses pops up.
The question then is, Why is Selenium so popular? Why is it the #1 automation testing tool in the market? Let’s find out.
1. Selenium is easy to use
When comparing Selenium with its competitors, Selenium is super easy to learn. Its UI is designed in a way that newbies can figure things out intuitively. Features such as ‘type words in any of the field boxes’ and ‘click of a button makes the package easy to navigate. In addition to that, you do not require intense coding knowledge to use Selenium. You can literally run automated tests with a basic set of instructions.
2. Selenium has specific tools for specific use cases.
The selenium test suite is divided into 4 verticals: Selenium IDE, Selenium Grid, Selenium Remote Control, and Selenium WebDriver.
- Selenium IDE is typically used for playing around with Selenium scripts. You can debug record, playback, and edit Selenium scripts with Selenium IDE.
- Selenium Grid is typically used for running multiple test cases in parallel. This is done by distributing the test across several browsers and machines. When there is a need to run many test cases, Selenium Grid saves time and it is recommended for such applications.
- Selenium Remote Control or Selenium RC: This is used to run tests in any programming language. It is typically used for testing the user interface of web applications when used against any HTTP website. In other words, it checks how the user would interact with the web application as though it were real. Selenium RC has however been deprecated and is no longer being maintained.
- Selenium WebDriver: This is perhaps the most popular component of Selenium. It is used to interact with the various Selenium APIs for different purposes. Selenium WebDriver is typically known for performing cross-platform test cases and ensuring that the web application performs as the developer expects.
3. Selenium supports multiple browsers.
Test cases can be run in Selenium on several browsers such as Chrome, Opera, Edge, Safari, Firefox etc. This is a huge win as testers are certain that the end-users get the expected web application functionality irrespective of the browser they use. The interesting thing is you do not necessarily need to rewrite test scripts for each of the browsers. A single script in Selenium would suffice for all browsers test cases.
4. Selenium can be used with a number of programming language
Selenium scripts can be written with a number of programming languages including Python, Java, C, Ruby, C++, etc. This means that if you have some preliminary knowledge of a specific programming language, you do not need to learn another programming language before writing Selenium scripts.
5. Selenium is open source with a vibrant community.
Everybody likes open-source projects. First of all, it is free to use and you can be sure of constant development. This applies to Selenium. The Selenium community is active and is practically the technical support for Selenium.
Also, the active community works around the clock to fix bugs, release updates and constantly improve the tool. This is why Selenium is the top choice in the automation testing market. The community is active and willing to help. So you are not alone.
6. Selenium supports a wide range of integrations.
While Selenium can be used for many test cases, browsers and machines, it is not an all-inclusive tool. To expand the possibilities of Selenium even further, it seamlessly supports the integration of third-party frameworks or ad-ons. For instance, if you wish to manage many test cases and generate reports, you may need to integrate Selenium with TestNG and JUnit. If you would need to perform test cases that are image-based, it may become necessary to integrate Selenium with Sikuli and the likes.
If you would like to perform continuous testing, it would be a good idea to integrate tools that have some CI/CD capacity. Tools such as Maven, Jenkins, and Docker. If you are performing multiple-browser testing with cloud-grid, you may be needing LambdaTest as an integration. Say you wish to test your web applications on mobile OS such as Android or iOS platforms, you can integrate Selenium with Appium. In all, Selenium supports the integration of virtually all the popular management tools.
7. Relatively lower hardware requirement
Selenium, when compared with other automation tools, has been found to have lower hardware requirements. Other automation tools such as UFT, QTP, SilkTest would require a higher computational resource to perform similar test cases. Putting it differently, Selenium has better resource-management architecture, requiring you to spend less on hardware yet getting more.
To wrap up, automation testing is a fast-growing field and is poised to grow even more. How online courses, blog articles and news headlines keep centering most of the content on Selenium is no coincidence. As the market grows, Selenium keeps leading. The reasons shown in this article are convincing enough to understand why that is. In the end, Selenium seems to check all the boxes an automation tester would need as they hit the ground running in automation testing.
