How to Succeed with Selenium: Open Source Test Automation Tool

In software development, it is a common practice to adopt test automation, once the software completes the stable phase of manual testing. Every organization thinks of automated testing as a way to cut down manual testing costs. The cost of testing is significant for any software project and organizations are keen to invest in open source testing tools than expensive commercial testing suites. There are varieties of open source testing tools available online, but this blog explores factors to succeed with the open source web automation tool – Selenium.

Why Selenium Testing

Selenium is one of the popular automated website testing tools available online and is used to test GUI and functionality of the website. Selenium is easy to get started with and any novice tester can handle it with minimum difficulties. Here are more reasons to select Selenium:

• Selenium can run on any mainstream browser.
• Selenium supports tests in many languages such as JAVA, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl and more.
• Selenium can be operated on your local computer, a third-party cloud server, on a server (with selenium remote) and on set of servers (with selenium grid).
• Selenium allows testers to write their own tests and run them across multiple browsers.

However, here are certain things to keep in mind when you decide to go with Selenium:

• Clear Understanding of Vision and Scope of Testing
  A thorough preparation is needed to succeed with Selenium. First of all you need to chart out a testing strategy and for that you need to outline following basics regarding the application– your revenue model, expected user behavior with application and type of browsers they might use and problems experienced with the application.
• Select An Appropriate Programming Language for Test Automation
  Selecting an appropriate programming language for writing acceptance tests for your website or application is a very important step to consider. It is always a best practice to consult with your application development team and understand their experiences and proficiencies with a particular language. A point to remember: functional knowledge of a chosen language is critical to evaluate the appropriateness of automated tests.
• Pick an Appropriate Text Editor
  In order to succeed with tests, you need to select an appropriate text editor. If you are a new tester and inexperienced with text editors, it is better to stick with something as basic as Sublime Text editor.
• Features of a Good Acceptance Test
  While creating new acceptance tests, you should keep these things in mind – tests should be descriptive, autonomous, atomic, should cope up with a test runner and should adhere to version control. Ensure that you create resilient test cases that specify an action or the time.
• Make it Robot and Human Friendly
  It is important to follow a simple testing architecture that is accessible to robots and humans as well.
  • Simplify test code with set up and tear down actions
  • Create a new spec file and store your tests in it
  • Follow simple tagging
  • Reporting – Junit, XML output (for robots) and screenshot, logs, videos for humans)
• Scaling
  You can scale automated tests through cloud execution, continuous integration and parallelization.

If you are skeptical about the success of selenium automated tests, Cigniti consultants can work with your team to maximize your productivity and returns with automated selenium tests.

Cigniti has developed Cigniti Test Automation Accelerator Kit (GTAAK) that offers tool agnostic framework, reusable object library as well as guidelines on best practices for automation. Get in touch with experts at Cigniti to know more about Selenium Testing.