In this article, I will discuss a few basics of Selenium Tool.
Why Selenium?
Any application developed requires thorough testing before it is given to the end user or customer.
Manual Testing is carried out for web applications to make sure the application is working as expected without any bugs or issues.
But Manual Testing has some drawbacks like:
- It requires more human effort.
- Regression Testing becomes a very tedious task as all test cases must be tested again after every change.
- It is very time consuming.
So an Automation Testing Tool like Selenium helps to overcome these drawbacks of Manual Testing.
What is Selenium?
Selenium is used to automate the tests for any web application.
Selenium is a browser automation tool. Any Web Application can be automated using Selenium.
This makes the testing process easy as the tests can be done any number of times automatically using test scripts without human intervention.
Now let us discuss the important features of Selenium to understand the tool better.
- It is an Open-Source Tool, hence can be used without purchasing any license.
- It is not a Single Tool, but a Set of Tools / Tool Suite namely
- Selenium Web Driver
- Selenium IDE and
- Selenium Grid
- It is compatible with different language bindings meaning the test scripts can be written in many languages like Java, C#, Python and many other languages.
- It also supports different browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.
- It works on different Operating Systems/ Platforms like Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.
- It has huge community support.
Because of all these, this tool is very popular.
Who developed Selenium?
Before learning any Tool, it's always important to know the history like when and how it came into existence so that we will know the actual purpose of the tool.
To start with, Jason Huggings, a developer from ‘ThoughtWorks’ Company developed a JavaScript which would automatically control the browser’s action for making the testing easier for his project work. He named it initially ‘JavaScriptTestRunner’. Later renamed it ‘Selenium’.
Let us see about the different components and their purpose in my next article.
Thank you.