Overcoming the Automation Challenges Using Selenium

Selenium is an Open Source Tool developed by ThoughtWorks. There are a set of Selenium tools which when combined provides you the power to automate simple to complex web application. Some of the Selenium Tool under ThoughtWorks umbrella are:

Selenium IDE – It is a Firefox add-on that makes it easy to record and playback tests in Firefox 2+. You can even use it to generate code to run the tests with Selenium Remote Control.

Selenium Remote Control (RC) – It is a client/server system that allows you to control web browsers locally or on other computers, using almost any programming language and testing framework.

Selenium Grid – It takes Selenium Remote Control to another level by running tests on many servers at the same time and cutting down on the time it takes to test multiple browsers or operating systems.

Bromine – It is a web-based QA tool of Selenium that enables you to easily run Selenium RC tests and view the results. It scales beautifully, from the single tester who just wants to run some tests without all the hassle; to the corporate solution, with multiple user-groups and hundreds of test cases.

Selenium is the best open source tool for doing automation for web based application and it does not have any cost attached to it. The only cost is the effort which will go for designing and developing the script for the application.

There is no need to define or develop separate Life Cycle for doing automation in Selenium. If you have an existing automation process, Selenium Automation Life Cycle will fit into that well. If you are using Selenium as an automation tool, you will find a lot of information online for the best process or Life Cycle to be adopted for automation.

Selenium scripting can be done in a number of programming languages like C#, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Java etc, unlike other commercial tools which support single scripting language. Since Selenium scripting can be done in any language of choice, one can easily find right resources for the programming language chosen for Selenium Automation.

Last but not the least, since this tool comes at ZERO PRICE, an organization’s management will find that the only investment they have made is on the infrastructure and human effort and not on the heavy licensing cost.