Selenium Introduction

Selenium is an open source and a portable automated software testing tool for testing web applications that has capabilities to operate across different browsers and operating systems. Selenium is just NOT a single tool but a set of tools that helps testers to automate web based applications more efficiently.

Let us now understand each one of those tools in the selenium suite and its uses. We will look at eac

ToolDescriptionSelenium IDESelenium IntegratedDevelopment Environment (IDE) is a Firefox plugin that lets testers to allows testers to record their actions as they follow the workflow that they need to test.Selenium RCSelenium Remote Control(RC) was the flagship testing framework that allowed more than simple browser actions and linear execution.It makes use of the full power of programming languages such as Java,C#,PHP,Python,Ruby and PERL to create more complex tests.Selenium WebDriverSelenium WebDriver is the successor to Selenium RC which sends commands directly to the browser and retrieves results.Selenium GridSelenium Grid is a tool used to run parallel tests across different machines and different browsers simultaneously which results in minimized execution time.

Selenium Advantages

QTP and Selenium are the most used tools in the market for software automation testing purposes. Hence it is making more sense to now compare the pros of selenium over QTP/UFT.

SeleniumQTP/UFTSelenium is an Open source tool.QTP is a Commercial tool and cost involved in each one of the license.Can be extended for various technologies which exposes DOM.Limited Add-ons and needs Add-ons for each one of those technologies.Has capabilities to execute the scripts across different browsers.Can run tests in specific versions of Firefox ,IE and Chrome.Can execute scripts on various Operating Systems.Works only with Windows.Supports mobile devices.Supports mobile devices with the help of third party tools.Executes tests within the browser, so focus is NOT required while script execution in progress.Needs Focus during script execution as the tool acts on the browser(mimics user actions)Can execute tests in parallel with use of Selenium Grids.QTP cannot execute tests in parallel but integrating QTP with QC allows testers to execute in parallel. QC is also a commercial tool.

Selenium Disadvantages

Let us now discuss the pitfalls of selenium over QTP.

SeleniumQTP/UFTSupports only Web Based Applications.Can test both Web and desktop applications.No Feature such as Object Repository/Recovery ScenarioQTP has OR and Recovery Scenarios built-in.No IDE so the script development won't be as fast as QTP.More Intuitive IDE, Automation can be achieved faster.Cannot access controls within the browserCan access controls within the browser such as favorites bar, backward and forward buttons.No Default test report generation.Default test result generation within the tool.For Parameterization, users has to rely on the programming languageParameterization is builtin and easy to implement.