Today's racing humanity demands optimum speed of completing a task. Constructing a web app requires countless hours of development then checking its functionalities, working conditions. With a digital population mounting up to 4.66 billion witnesses good web traffic; hence looks for methodologies to work in a significantly shorter time frame for a bug-free release. So many developers choose Selenium testing over others. Selenium testing tool automates web applications. It is an open-source tool that provides a single interface that lets you write test scripts in programming languages like Java, Ruby, NodeJS, Python, PHP, Perl, and C#.

A deeper look into Selenium automation testing shows us that adding extra selenium commands is slow and unreliable. As a result, it consumes much time.

SELENIUM AND ITS COMPONENTS:

Selenium testing tool is potent. It works on all primary OS and also enables you to take control of the web browser through a program. Four major components of Selenium Testing are:

1. Selenium IDE: It is a comprehensive Selenium integrated development environment (IDE). It's available as a Firefox Add-On and a Chrome Extension. It allows you to record, amend, and debug functional tests. It was previously referred to as Selenium Recorder.

2. Selenium RC: Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a Java-based server that receives browser commands through HTTP. RC enables the creation of Selenium automated testing for a web application in any programming language, allowing Selenium to integrate into the current unit test frameworks. The Selenium project now includes client drivers for PHP, Python, Ruby,.NET, Perl, and Java to make creating tests easier. The Java driver is also compatible with JavaScript (via the Rhino engine). For one to execute the HTML test case, an instance of the Selenium RC server is required, which means that the port should be distinct for each concurrent run. However, for Java/PHP test cases, just one Selenium RC instance must be running continuously.

3. Selenium Web driver: Selenium WebDriver is the replacement for Selenium RC. Selenium WebDriver receives instructions (either in Selenese or through a Client API) and transmits them to a browser. This is accomplished using a browser-specific browser driver, which sends commands to and gets results from a browser. Most browser drivers run and access a browser program (such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, or Microsoft Edge); however, a HtmlUnit browser driver mimics a browser using the headless browser HtmlUnit.

4. Selenium GRID: Selenium Grid is a server that enables testing to leverage distant web browser instances. One server serves as the hub in Selenium Grid. For one to gain access to browser instances, tests make contact with the hub. The hub maintains a list of servers that give access to browser instances (WebDriver nodes) and allows tests to utilize them. Selenium Grid enables concurrent testing on numerous workstations and central management of different browser versions and browser settings (instead of in each test).

The ability to conduct tests on remote browser instances is beneficial for spreading the testing load over many workstations and running tests in browsers running on different platforms or operating systems.

According to Enlyft, a data-driven research company showed that Selenium has a market share of about 27.6%

ADVANTAGES VS DISADVANTAGES:

Let's take a quick stroll across the  pros and cons of selenium software testing

A survey conducted in 2021 showed that nearly 65 %of respondents used JavaScript, and just over 56 % stated using HTML/CSS. SQL,  Python, and Java rounded out the top five most widely used programming languages around the world.

PROBLEMS FACED:

Here's a real-life illustration of Selenium automation testing. I'll perform a test to uncover and resolve a 70% inefficiency in test run time in the scenario below. 

Since every Selenium command has the possibility of an incorrect element location or a synchronization issue, having many Selenium commands in your test can make it significantly slower and less trustworthy.

Let's consider the example where A legacy version test takes 300 seconds to complete and makes 364 Selenium queries.

The same test takes 92 seconds after following the test optimizations - which is roughly four times quicker.

IDENTIFYING THE INEFFICIENCIES: 

The fundamental cause of failure in this scenario is the inability to find the element. It fails72 seconds into the test.

The rest of the test is spent on meaningless and repetitive tasks that don't lead to any improvement. For example, until 2:12, the trial continues to look for Scheduler for another 60 seconds.

The test now runs some random actions, most likely to refresh a state, before continuing its search for Scheduler, which will never appear if it hasn't shown in the last 60 seconds.

It took only 72 seconds out of 300 seconds to figure out that the Scheduler element didn't exist. As a result, 76 percent of the test time is wasted, as it yields no new or valuable information. Your teams' feedback loop will be 76 percent lower due to this.

THE SOLUTION:

Waiting for an element to display for more than 20 seconds is inefficient because most current online apps load in under 20 seconds. More data from the app under test can substantiate this assertion.

The time it takes to load the URL (at 11:00), discover a login field, and transfer keys are only 5.75 seconds, as seen in the graphic below. It takes 5.75 seconds from the initial interaction with an element to the rendered page.

This test would only take 92 seconds to complete, compared to 300 seconds from the original trial, and would get the same results.

CONCLUSION:

Effective selenium automation is easy. You need to figure out the maximum amount of time that is acceptable to wait for an element to appear on a web page. For the most modern apps, 20 secs is recommended.

Then, for up to 20 seconds, use an explicit wait to wait for an element to be in a particular state. The test should then fail with a timeout exception, indicating that the feature was not visible on the page within the specified timeframe. Most current online apps may benefit from this method. These factors can smooth the process, enhance Selenium automation's efficiency, and cut down your inefficiency by 70%.

Most modern companies rely heavily on automation and industrial software development. It is critical in technology, engineering, and scientific research. Industrial software alone is predicted to be worth 43 billion US dollars in 2021.