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Pros and Cons of Selenium Testing Automation Software

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    Selenium is one of the most notable examples of open source success. The industry-standard QA tool is the web app testing framework, which has been around since shortly after the year 2000.

    It represents the once-exciting revolutionary promise of the internet. It is a free tool created and altered by a sizable development community globally.

     

    What is Selenium?

    To test the internal Time and Expenses application at ThoughtWorks, Jason Huggins developed a key tool called "JavaScriptTestRunner." This program was the model for Selenium. As a portable, open-source platform for automated testing, it is currently gaining favor among software testers and developers. It provides the ability to automate browsers using particular browser bindings in order to test web applications. It consists of a quartet of tools with various uses. Let's examine Selenium and the various tools it offers in more detail.

    Pros of Selenium

    It is free and open-source

    • Everyone enjoys Selenium because it is totally free and open-source.
    • This makes using Selenium for automated testing simple for companies of all sizes.
    • Since it is open-source, there are no fees and the community constantly creates new features.

    Live community

    • Selenium is usually discussed when talking about test automation, as was already said.
    • Over 30% of automation solutions are built on Selenium, which is already used by more than 50k businesses in their test automation frameworks (for example, TestProject's 100% free test automation platform, which combines Selenium and Appium for you along with a variety of other features!).
    • Selenium is commonly used by specialists, therefore the community is kept alive by blog posts, courses, forum conversations, and tools created to help one another.

    Language Agnostic

    • Learning a new programming language is not necessary to use a testing automation tool.
    • Fortunately, that's not the situation here. Because Selenium WebDriver offers native bindings for JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, and Ruby, it is more likely that you or your team possesses the necessary programming expertise.
    • Even if this is the case, Selenium still has its own syntax, which makes learning one of these languages difficult.

    Supports Test Automation Frameworks

    • Selenium can be used in conjunction with the Maven or ANT frameworks for source code compilation.
    • Utilizing well-liked and well-known testing frameworks like TestNG and RSpec, it can also be used to test programs and produce results.
    • Additionally, it works nicely with continuous integration technologies like Jenkins and can even communicate with other open-source programs to enable new functionality.
    • Selenium offers good support for features and the creation and automation of numerous test cases due to its respectable age.

    Selenium Supports Parallel Testing

    • Parallel testing can result in both more successful and unsuccessful testing.
    • The entire test suite is separated and run on many devices concurrently rather than running as a single sequential data flow, enabling a considerably speedier feedback loop.
    • A suite can be finished in a fraction of the time necessary to receive test case results when it is divided into manageable sections.

    Cons of Selenium

    Learning curve

    • The best Selenium implementation is Selenium WebDriver.
    • To become an expert at using Selenium WebDriver, it takes time and effort.
    • Selenium WebDriver automation testing takes extensive research before beginning. At the moment, test automation is moving away from solutions that involve programming and toward ones that don't.
    • Users of Chrome and Firefox can only access Selenium IDE, a simple test automation tool that can be used as a replacement.

    No built-in reporting capabilities

    • Selenium is very lacking in reports.
    • Testers and developers are required to submit reports with the results of test automation for management, vendors, clients, and stakeholders.
    • In addition, Selenium requires connections to numerous frameworks and libraries in order to provide test results and gather data on how tests were executed.
    • Solutions like TestProject provide such Selenium dashboards and reporting functionalities easily accessible, free of charge, and without the need to integrate any additional third-party applications.

    High TCO

    • What is selenium's primary flaw? The most likely culprit is its increased price. But hold on a minute. Surely it was obvious that selenium was free.
    • Because it is an open-source solution, you can use it without paying a licence fee. However, it is not truly free.
    • Whenever you buy anything, not just selenium, consider the total cost of ownership (TCO).
    • The steep learning curve, lack of technical support, requirement for other tools for particular functionality, and other issues result in the entire cost of Selenium being substantially greater than the zero you see on its price tag.

    Web Only

    • Selenium is the name of a web-specific automated testing tool.
    • Mobile native apps and mobile hybrid apps are not supported, while it is possible to test mobile web apps with the appropriate plugins.
    • Desktop applications are in no way supported. It may be completely eliminated from many QA initiatives as a result of that restriction.

    Limited Support Behind the Scenes

    • One of the most popular testing tools on the market is Selenium, but its impact goes far beyond the architecture it supports.
    • Because it is an open-source program, its development team is small and made up solely of volunteers.
    • For the entire year of 2018, there were barely a dozen or so regular contributors. In addition, since 2016, just one person has been responsible for maintaining the integrated development environment (IDE).
    • As a result, the IDE briefly stopped supporting Firefox in late 2018. Although the situation has recently improved, open-source technologies are notoriously slow to develop.

    Conclusion

    Selenium is without a doubt the most widely used test automation tool available today. Numerous businesses all over the world are currently automating their testing with Selenium due to its strong advantages and features.

    It is possible to utilise Selenium APIs in tests produced on a platform thanks to technologies like TestProject, which make use simple by preventing the installation of Selenium and a number of other tools like Appium for mobile testing and reporting libraries because TestProject already includes them.