Introduction to Selenium

                                                               

                                                  "Selenium Automates Browser"

Selenium is an open source tool which is used for automating web applications.
It is primarily used by software testers for testing various Websites and it was developed by Jason Huggins an engineer at Thought Works in 2004.

The Key Features Of Selenium are:

• It supports a vast number of browsers
• It works on vast number of operating Systems
• It supports mobile devices
• Can execute multiple test cases in parallel
• Open source tool
• It supports multiple languages

Tool Suites of Selenium

Depending on the testing needs selenium is categorized into four components:

1. Selenium IDE
• Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests.
• Selenium IDE is a fire fox add-on that records clicks , typing and other actions to make test cases which tester can playback in the fire fox browser and export to Selenium RC.
• Selenium IDE has the following features: record/ playback feature, debugging with step by step and break points.
• Selenium IDE allows you to save tests as HTML, Java, Ruby scripts, or any other format. Allows you to add selenese commands as and when required.4
2. Selenium RC
• A solution to cross browser testing.
• A server, written in Java and so available on all the platforms.
• Acts as a proxy for web requests from them.
• Client libraries for many popular languages.
• Bundles Selenium Core and automatically loads into the browser.
• Selenium RC is used to enhance your script.
3. Selenium Grid
• Selenium-Grid allows the Selenium-RC solution to scale for test suites or test suites to be run in multiple environments.
• With Selenium-Grid multiple instances of Selenium-RC are running on various operating system and browser configurations, each of these when launching register with a hub. When tests are sent to the hub they are then redirected to an available Selenium-RC, which will launch the browser and run the test.
• This allows for running tests in parallel, with the entire test suite theoretically taking only as long to run as the longest individual test.
4. Selenium Webdriver
• WebDriver is designed in a simpler and more concise programming interface along with addressing some limitations in the Selenium-RC API.
• WebDriver is a compact Object Oriented API when compared to Selenium1.0.
• It drives the browser much more effectively and overcomes the limitations of Selenium 1.x which affected our functional test coverage, like the file upload or download, pop-ups and dialogs barrier

C# is a powerful and elegant language to learn and in this tutorial we continue to use Selenium in C# .

In our next tutorial let us learn to setup selenium in Visual studio IDE!