What are the Prerequisites for Performing Selenium Automation Testing?

What are the Prerequisites for Performing Selenium Automation Testing?
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If you're planning to switch from manual to automated testing, then Selenium is the best open-source automation tool you can use for automation testing. But, do you know how to use Selenium or what it requires to automate tests with Selenium?

Selenium is an open-source automation framework that efficiently automates web application testing. As a result, it can speed up the entire testing process while avoiding tedious tasks and errors. In short, Selenium speaks the language of browsers, which means it can drive the behavior of browsers like clicking a button, typing in a search bar, scrolling down a page, and more.

Usually, Selenium is the preferred choice of QAs to automate tedious testing tasks. It is a popular tool that can improve test accuracy and reliability when utilized properly. But, Selenium isn't made for everyone; if you don't follow the right techniques, it can be a disaster.

Why Use Selenium for Automation Testing?

There are plenty of reasons to use Selenium for automation testing. First of all, it is an open-source testing suite that can fulfill all your automated testing requirements. In addition, it doesn't require any license, which is a major advantage for testers. Furthermore, it consists of various tools, including Selenium IDE, Selenium WebDriver, Selenium Grid, and Selenium RC. Each of these tools has its own specialty and purpose for automation testing.

  • Compatible with all programming languages, including C#, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc.

  • Ideal for all operating systems like Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.

  • Easy integration with most testing frameworks like TestNG, JUnit, and Jenkin for managing and generating testing reports

  • Offers continuous testing with tools like Maven, Jenkins, and Docker

There are many other benefits that you can explore anytime over the internet. Here, we will talk about what you need before starting automated testing with Selenium.

Prerequisites for Selenium Automation

Selenium does sound like a handy tool, but it has many drawbacks. If you're just beginning with Selenium, there are a few things that you need to take care of before onboarding to selenium automation.

  • Coding Skills

If you're switching from manual to automated testing, you probably don't have much experience in coding. With Selenium, you need to set up and maintain your test cases, which means you need hands-on experience in programming languages. It is challenging for testers, especially those who were earlier into manual testing.

  • Maintaining Test Scripts

Apart from writing scripts, you also need to maintain them continuously, which is only feasible if you have good programming skills with lots of time. But, if you don't have the relevant skills and time to find and fix bugs in your testing scripts, it'll be challenging for you.

  • Integrating with Existing Testing Cycle

In agile development, tests are generated and released continuously to maintain the continuous integration and delivery of the product. If you're planning to go with Selenium, you need to ensure that your code speaks with the rest of the release pipeline. For instance, if Git is used in your testing cycle, you must be aware of the code versioning in your Git repository.

  • Setting appropriate Test Environments

Whether you're using Selenium or not, setting up your test environment is a complex task itself. However, it becomes a little easy to set up parallel test environments and perform cross-browser testing with Selenium; it can take months, even if you're a professional developer.

  • Reporting with Selenium

Most testers think that Selenium is an all-in-one solution, which is not true! You need to integrate a third-party tool with Selenium for monitoring and reporting. For instance, you need access to a monitoring tool if you want to monitor your testing cycle throughout the testing phase.

Selenium requires a lot more than just a testing environment, including time, resources, coding knowledge, and much more. And if you give it to inexperienced testers, it'll become a mess. Nevertheless, Selenium is an ideal option for automating web application testing, so you should consider this factor before adopting it. Besides, it doesn't support data-driven testing, requiring sophisticated programming and separate management and data storage assets.

However, if you're still determined to use Selenium in your SDLC, you can use a tool that easily integrates with it and provides essential features to make your testing process smoother.

Lambdatest Automation with Selenium

Lambdatest is integrated with the Selenium grid that allows you to perform end-to-end testing on web applications. It provides a secure and reliable selenium infrastructure to test your web app across more than 3000 web browsers and operating systems. In addition, it is designed to empower development and testing teams to accelerate their release cycles.

With Lambdatest Selenium automation, you can increase your test coverage by running tests parallel and ensuring a seamless user experience. It provides the next-gen test execution platform for agile testing teams to perform testing on the cloud with the same speed as locally hosted web apps. Another advantage of using LambdaTest automation is the easy debugging of test scripts with Hawkeye insights.

It allows you to dive deeper into exception logs, network logs, command logs, and selenium logs to reflect end-to-end test execution. Besides, it supports all the testing languages and frameworks to help you expand your web app testing across a wide area.

How to Use Selenium Automation?

Now that you know what is required for Selenium automation testing, let's look at the steps to follow to use it. Selenium WebDriver is the most preferred tool to automate web app testing; it follows the below steps in a testing cycle.

  • Install and configure Selenium WebDriver in your environment

  • Create a WebDriver instance

  • Go to the web page that you want to test

  • Locate an HTML element on the web page

  • Perform an action on the HTML element

  • Anticipate the browser's response

  • Execute the test cases

Make sure you have test scripts ready to perform the above steps. Once the test scripts are ready, you can run them to test any web application.

Final Words

Moving to Selenium automation testing could be a good decision if you know what is required before the transition. Unfortunately, most QA teams often overlook the essential factors for selenium automation testing. In this article, we discussed what you need to adopt Selenium in your automation testing cycle while discussing the steps to perform Selenium automation testing.

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