Introduction of selenium

Selenium is made up of several software tools, each of which offers different approaches for the automation of support tests. Most of Selenium's quality control engineers focus on the tool that best suits the needs of your project. However, learning all the tools will give you many different ways to approach different test automation problems.

The complete toolkit offers a variety of test features that adapt to the needs of the test web applications of all kinds. These operations are very flexible and provide many options to locate the elements of the user interface and compare the results of the expected tests with the actual behavior of the application. One of the key features of Selenium is the support to run tests on multiple browser platforms.

Selenium Tool Suite

Selenium is made up of several software tools. Everyone has a specific role.

Selenium 2 (also known as Selenium WebDriver)

Selenium 2 is the future direction of the project and the latest addition to the Selenium toolset. This completely new automation tool offers all kinds of excellent features, including a more consistent and object-oriented API, as well as a response to the limitations of the previous implementation.

Both the developers of Selenium and WebDriver agreed that both tools have advantages, and that the combination of the two projects would be a much more robust automation tool.

Selenium 2.0 is the result of this effort. It is compatible with the WebDriver API and the underlying technology and Selenium 1 technology under the WebDriver API for maximum flexibility in carrying your tests. In addition, Selenium 2 continues to run the Selenium 1 Selenium RC interface for backwards compatibility.

Selenium 1 (also known as Selenium RC or remote control)

Selenium RC was for a long time the most important Selenium project before WebDriver / Selenium launched Selenium 2, the newest and most powerful tool.

Now, Selenium 1 is outdated and is not actively supported (mainly in maintenance mode).

Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a prototyping tool for creating test scripts. It is a Firefox and Chrome add-on, which provides an easy-to-use interface for developing automated tests. Selenium IDE has a recording function that records the user's actions during execution and then exports them as a reusable script in one of the many programming languages ​​that can be executed later.

Although the Selenium IDE has a "save" function that allows users to save the tests in a spreadsheet format for later import and later execution, it is not designed to run the tests and not to create all the automated ones. . In particular, Selenium IDE does not provide iteration or conditional statements for test scripts. At the time of writing, there is no plan to add anything. The reasons are partly technical in nature and are based in part on the Selenium developers who promote best practices in the automation of tests that always require some programming.

Selenium IDE is simply meant to be a rapid prototyping tool. The Selenium developers recommend Selenium 2 or Selenium 1 for a robust and robust test automation that will be used with one of the many compatible programming languages.

Selenium grid

Selenium Grid allows scalability of the Selenium RC solution for large test suites and test suites that must be run in multiple environments. With Selenium Grid, you can run your tests in parallel, which means that different tests can run simultaneously on different remote computers.

This has two advantages. First of all, if you have a large test set or a slow running test set, you can significantly increase performance using Selenium Grid to split your test set so that different tests are run at the same time with those different machines. If you need to run your test suite in multiple environments, you can also use several remote computers that support and run your tests simultaneously. In any case, Selenium Grid significantly improves the time it takes to run your suite through parallel processing.