Manual testing has become obsolete these days because it leads to more number of resources per task and increases cost per project. Automating regression and functional suites and tests with the help of Selenium and the WebDriver API is a good choice to reduce manual intervention and the cost associated. Selenium supports multiple programming languages like Java, Python, and Ruby and C #
Selenium has support of some of the largest browser vendors like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. Thus, Selenium is considered as one of the most preferred open source tools for automation testing. Now, let us delve into more detail how the website and web apps can be automated using Selenium.
How To Start With Selenium
First, you need to analyze the application you want to automate. Next, you should know whether you want to do it with record and play or writing robust, browser-based regression automation suites and tests.
If you don’t need a full-fledged framework and if the tests which you want to automate are quite simple then you can go for record and play feature of Selenium IDE. It is implemented as Chrome and Firefox Extension. It has intelligent field selection which can identify an element using ID, Class and Xpath.
You can even debug and set breakpoints. You can put all test cases in single project file which contains all test cases and suites. It is very easy to learn as selenese commands are quite simple and the best thing is that you can do it easily without having any programming knowledge.
Selenium RC can also be used for writing automated web application tests. You can write test in any programming language against any HTTP website using any JavaScript enabled browser. It comes in two parts. One is the server which automatically launches the browser and kills them. It also acts as a HTTP Proxy for web request from them.
Second are the client libraries. It can be used for AJAX based web user interfaces and for some new browser which gets launched in market. It is getting deprecated with the advent of selenium Web driver which eliminated the need of the server which acts as an intermediate between Browser and Java Client.
