The Pros and Cons of Selenium Testing

The evolution of code is happening on a regular basis by various teams across the globe in the domain of agile development. In this regard, Selenium is the most powerful open source automation tool that is available in the recent times. It has a suite of tools that helps to automate the browsers. How to put this power into use completely depends on the developer. This portable software testing framework is used to test web applications and it provides a record tool to authorize tests even without learning the scripting language.

This language is, however, similar to Java to a large extent. Tests are majorly run to ensure that the quality of the product is accurate. Thus, the need for the regression tests arises. Each time a test is carried out a new feature is added and the test scripts are updated with additional cases. As a result these become lengthy and huge. During the time of execution such large test scripts affect speed of completing the project. Thus, the developers require an effective open source tool, like, Selenium which aids in automating these repetitive cases.

There are various other pros of Selenium tool owing to which it is preferred during the software development:

Low Cost Tool

Besides being an open source tool, it is also free. Thus, it is easily downloadable and so the programmers can use the tools to automate the testing of web applications in any given language.

Browser Compatibility Testing

Now you can conveniently test the applications to check whether they are running properly across multiple web browsers, like, Mozilla, IE, Safari. The developers are required to develop the scripts just once.

Choice of Language

There are Selenium client libraries which can be easily imported into popular languages, such as, Net beans, Eclipse, Visual Studio.net and others.

Multiple Testing Frameworks

It supports various testing frameworks, such as, JUnit, PHPUnit, TestNg, etc.

Easy to Integrate With Testing Ecosystem

This is another USP of this software. It can be integrated without trouble with various kinds of suite tools that include Selenium grid, Hudson, OMetry, Saucelabs, etc.

Support for AJAX

It also provides a strong support system for AJAX technologies.

Open for Enhancement

The developers can expand the Selenium for more complex testing like production monitoring and load testing.

Useful for Comprehensive Testing

It can be utilized for regression, user interface, functional and UAT testing.

Test Driven Development

Agile methodology and Extreme programming (XP) community are the two major areas where Selenium is widely used by the developers.

Selenium RC Server Not Required

This framework does not need the standalone Selenium RC server to function.

Strong Community

High quality documents and web community are available for Selenium.

While this framework is quite popular for its advantages but there are certain cons/disadvantages too. Here’s a list of cons of Selenium testing:

Problems While Testing

This is one of the major drawbacks of Selenium testing. After you have injected the code into the HTML source (application or website) for testing purpose, it might show unpredictable behavior. Moreover, you can only inject a single base URL in the JavaScript owing to its Same Origin Policy.

Issues with finding Locators

Locators supporting common attributes like names, ids, XPATH, javascriptDOM, etc have to be found by using firebugs.

Limitation in Browser Support

If you want the scripts to work on multiple browsers then they should be written using Selenium IDE and used with Selenium core or RC. Otherwise the scripts will only work on Mozilla.

Manual Scripts Not Allowed

Data Driven Testing has manual scripts, like, conditions and loops. This is not supported by this framework.

Recorded Scripts Not allowed to Run

Scripts are often converted to Java, C# or Ruby. But this software cannot run such applications.

Slow Performance

There are certain methods that might slow down because of implementation differences.

Image Verification

There are no options for image verification.

If you are opting for this framework then you will have to find solutions for the above-mentioned disadvantages. If you are planing to hire selenium testing company, you must evaluate them to see if they are sufficiently dexterous or not!

We provide selenium web testing services. If you would like to hire selenium tester for your testing requirements, please contact us at Mindfire Solutions.