Test Automation - Selenium Way

 Test automation, automates the execution of repetitive and selective tests to validate the outcome of software or product against the expected results. This practice reduce the manual intervention and increases the productive of the team. The test automation is a part of continuous integration where developer can validate the code updates in quicker passion.

 Tests can be automated either code-driven or GUI record and playback method. The code-driven testing commonly used in a Test-Driven Development (TDD) using testing frameworks like of NUnit, JUnit and Selenium. GUI record and playback method records the user screen and enables the user to playback them to executes the tests. Code-drive testing is the popular model test automation this enables test automation at different level software development lifecycle.

 Selenium is the popular open source testing framework, which can be used to perform both code-driven and GUI based test automation for web applications. The selenium has two different parts to automate the test execution,

• Selenium IDE
• Selenium WebDriver, webdriver is the latest version of selenium remote control. The selenium RC has been depreciated.

Selenium IDE
 Selenium IDE is available as the Firefox extension, which allows to record and play the test steps and play it back. The tool allows you to edit the recorded scripts. The extension build as IDE, which bundled with lot of features. Using IDE you can also convert the scripts into source of different languages.

Web Driver (Upgraded version of Remote Control and part of Selenium 2.0)
 The main features of Webdriver is to address the limitations of Selenium 1.0 and provides more concise programming interface. The WebDriver support dynamic pages, AJAX calls, and automates the test scripts for modern web applications. The WebDriver directly runs on the browser, which doesn’t requires Selenium-Server.

Remote Control (depreciated and part of selenium 1.0)
 The selenium RC has been depreciated and WebDriver was released to address the limitations of RC. The Selenium-Server required to run tests, which stars and kills the browsers to execute the test. The Selenese commands passed from the client program, written in java, ruby, python, .NET, perl or php, to the RC server and RC server executes them by starting the browser.

Browser Support

• Selenium IDE can be used only in Firefox.
• IE, version 6 -10 are required.
• Safari, version 5.1+ required and only in OS X
• Opera, version 12.x and older versions are supported.
• Chrome, uses chromium project to support selenium